Lotus Work At Home Mums Blog

Marketing for home business: Don’t spread yourself too thin

By Leigh Hunt on July 12th, 2007

As a home-based business I’m guessing your marketing budget has it’s limitations.  Fair assumption?  If so, a sure way to get the most from your marketing spend is to focus your efforts on a specific group of people, known as a niche market. 

These will be potential customers that all have something in common.  They might have a love for golf, fitness, fishing, anything!  Or they might belong to a certain sector of business, i.e. Accountants.  The opportunities are almost limitless, but whoever they are, your niche market must:

a) have a need for your product or service,
b) be able to afford to buy your product or service, and
c) be easily accessible. 

In addition, depending on your business, you might choose a market that you have some affinity with.  People buy from people. If your customers can connect with you, they are more likely to buy from you.  A fact that holds true for service businesses in particular.

When exploring the concept of ‘niching’ for small business I like to adapt an analogy I once heard about a football stadium.  Imagine a football stadium with terraces full of people on a wintry day.  You’re stood in the middle of the pitch faced with the task of lighting a fire that will warm the whole crowd. You light your fire and wait for the crowd to warm up.  Before long though, you realise that everybody is still freezing cold!  You just don’t have enough logs to build a big enough fire, so the logs you do have are wasted. 

The next day you return to the stadium with the same number of logs and the same task.  This time you decide to light your fire in a corner of the stadium, and low and behold the crowd in that corner feel the warmth of your fire and receive the benefit of it immediately.  OK, so you couldn’t please everybody, but the people you did please were positively delighted!  And they want you to come and warm them up the next day, and the day after that.  What a result! 

The moral of the story?  Unless you’ve got an infinite supply of logs (money) choose WHO you want to benefit from the warmth of your fire (product/service) according to the three rules above. Then target your marketing accordingly.

Having a clear target market will allow you to fine tune your marketing message and find direct routes to market.  For example, a Massage Therapist could aim to massage just about everybody.  But where would s/he find ‘everybody’?  And what would s/he say to ‘everybody’ to get ‘everybody’ interested?  Hmmmmm.

On the other hand, s/he could decide to specialise in pregnancy massage or workplace massage.  S/he’s then able to convey a very specific message and find direct routes to market.

In summary, if you’ve got a colossal budget by all means target the masses, if not niche, niche, niche!

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