A simple fact that every business owner or entrepreneur has to accept is that you cannot reach everyone, and that’s okay. There might be hundreds of thousands of prospective customers or clients in your area, all potentially interested in your goods and services, but the simple truth of the matter is that it’s just not viable to market to every single one of them.
Marketing to a very wide audience is a waste of time and money; it’s diluted, ineffective, and bland. Instead, you have to focus on a select niche of people, your perfect candidates(opens in a new tab), your most profitable prospects. But how do you do that? Read on to find out.
Make Use of Your Network
The first step when doing almost anything in business is to look at what tools, resources, knowledge, and contacts you already have and use them to the best of your abilities, rather than spending more time and money seeking out new ones. If you’ve already got a good network, that means you have contacts who know and trust you, and who are willing to share your message around and to put you in touch with valuable leads.
Keep it Simple
No matter what kind of industry you’re in, whether it’s custom writing services(opens in a new tab) or the sale of bath products, the golden rule is to keep things simple. Instead of focusing on multiple industries and niches when starting, simply choose one relatively small market that requires the benefits you provide. Then start looking at the commonalities between customers in that niche. Look at their profile traits and behaviors and use that information to build up a skeleton or framework of your perfect customer.
Grow from There
Once you’ve honed in on your perfect prospect profile(opens in a new tab), you can start to gradually expand over time. When you start seeing success with leads and sales, that’s a sign that you’re on the right track and can start branching out a little further. Expanding your niche to include more and more people means expanding your potential customer or clientele pool and breaking into other market segments. For example, let’s say you have a software product that performs particularly well in one sub-industry, a means of expansion could be to look at similar sub-industries and branch out into them, adjusting your approach accordingly.
Be Specific
Don’t feel like you need to focus on every single demographic and consider all behavioral traits when trying to identify your perfect client profile. In short, don’t feel like you need to cover all of the bases. Be specific. Think about the most important factors in terms of your buyers, such as age bracket, level of education, industry, and more. Remember, you’re not trying to find people who might be interested in your goods or services, you want people who almost definitely need to buy them.
Find the Patterns
If you really want to be successful in finding profitable prospects, you need to act almost like a researcher or analyst, looking for patterns and trends in the traits and behaviors of customers. Perhaps sales seem to rise at certain times of the year, or perhaps interest in one particular strategy or solution is beginning to increase due to recent industry developments. Identify those patterns, track them, and use that information to find out how, when, and why customers are behaving the way they do.
Make the Most of the Internet
The internet has changed the game for almost every business imaginable, and it’s a tool you simply can’t overlook when trying to network, market, and reach out to profitable prospects. Sites like LinkedIn are especially useful for this, allowing you to actually search for and filter contacts who can put you in touch with the right people for your brand, allowing you to develop working relationships with them and adding value to your business.
Attend Conferences
Many people in business attend conferences and similar events, but few of them really take advantage of the unique opportunities these events provide. Smart business owners can use conferences to learn more about how to take their businesses to the next level and to identify quality leads. Regardless of your trade you can always find conferences going on in your domain and use them to build up your profile.
Conclusion
Finding the perfect prospects can seem like a challenge when you first start, but you should soon see that there are many different ways to identify these prospective customers and clients, and you already have a lot of the necessary tools at your disposal. Follow the guidance above and you’ll start connecting with ideal customers in no time.
Find this article useful? Enter your details below to receive your FREE copy of 95 Epic Places To List Your Tours and receive regular updates from Tourism Tiger and leading industry experts.
By submitting this form, you agree to Tourism Tiger contacting you via email.