What strategy are you following to grow your MLM business? Do you know who your target market is? Do you know what your target market needs? Do you know where your target market hangs out? Do you know the words that resonate with your target market? You must have specific answers to these questions backed by solid research and facts to ensure your long term success.
A BIG Business Always Requires a Clear Strategy
While you can build a small MLM business in a non-targeted way, talking to friends and family and everyone within 3 feet of you, you’ll never build a huge downline using this approach unless you get super lucky. Instead of relying on luck, you need to rely on proven marketing strategies just like any ‘traditional’ business.
Always Craft a Marketing Strategy Before a Marketing Plan
Put first things first. As excited as you are to get started, a plan is nothing without a strategy. The strategy is the WHAT and the plan is the HOW. For example, if you sell telecommunications services you might target cell customers of a particular carrier that has poor coverage in your area. That is the WHAT – the marketing strategy. Reaching those people might involve an e-mail marketing campaign with the subject header “Are you fed up with XYZ Carrier as much as I am? You have a choice.” That is the HOW – the marketing plan. The plan will guide your day-to-day activities. The strategy should guide ALL your activities taken as a whole.
Is Targeted Marketing a Necessary Component of MLM Success?
Frankly – YES.
Marketing is the art of creating desire for a product or service. To do this, you must connect to a goal the prospect wants to achieve. If they truly care about fixing an issue and they can clearly see how your solution addresses the issue, you’ll be able to close them unimpeded.
1. What problems are people concerned about?
Notice that all of your marketing activity must flow backwards from the problems people care about. Have you ever made a list of the problems each of your products solves? Do they provide income protection in the event of an accident? Do they save money on long distance services people buy anyway? Do they help slow the aging process? Do they teach online lead generation? Do they reduce wrinkles
Don’t ever forget, it has to be an issue people care about. Furthermore, it requires that they care enough to take action. Someone whose father just got injured and cannot work is generally ready to act. Someone whose doctor has just told them they have high cholesterol is generally ready to take action. A network marketer struggling to generate leads in the cold market is probably ready to take action. Someone that was charged $40 in overage fees last month is generally ready to act.
2. How do you choose your targeted problems in developing your marketing strategy?
First make a list of all the potential problems that your products or services solve really well. Choose only one to three problems to target. numerous factors go into making this choice. The major factors you’ll want to consider are:
1) The number of people with the problem. How big is the market?
2) The severity of the problem. How badly do people want to solve the problem?
3) The competitive intensity. How many alternative solutions are there for this problem?
4) Your unique skills and expertise.
There is no right or wrong answer here. A large market where there is little urgency to change may underperform a small market where the people are eager to move quickly to solve a problem. This is one of the reasons that other network marketers are one of your best target markets. The market is concentrated and highly motivated.
3. Where do people with these problems hang out?
Although you aren’t quite ready to move on to marketing planning, you do need to assess where you’ll find your target customers in the strategy phase. Can you reach them? If yes, where would you find a group so that you aren’t trapped marketing to individuals? Being able to generate your own network marketing leads based on market intelligence is critcal to your success.
Is the Internet the Answer?
The Internet is one of many answers to this question and for most network marketers it is the most powerful answer. The Internet is full of niches of people specifically looking for solutions to their problems. Use Google’s free External Keyword Research Tool or the paid Wordtracker application to study the niches. How many people are searching for ‘reducing cholesterol’ or ’save for retirement’ or ‘eliminate wrinkles’ or ‘free international calling’? Next look at how many other pages you are competing with for each issue.
So many Internet marketing newcomers waste huge amounts of money and time on web pages with zero visitors because they didn’t take the time to learn. Don’t make this mistake. It is possible to be on the first page of Google, but it takes a focused niche strategy to do it. An MLM mentor who markets on the Internet and knows how to get pages ranking well will be an invaluable resource.
