1. Understand the difference between your Target Market and your Niche. A target market has distinguishing demographic characteristics; for example, recently widowed professional women under 50. A niche gets more specific in characteristics that might not be as easily identifiable as demographics; using the previous example, you could further narrow the target market by including only women who want to remarry and don’t know how to meet suitable men.
   
2. Make sure your Niche is focused enough. Think of all the people who might fit in your niche. Imagine them all in a room at a business or social event. Would you find them all interesting and enjoy talking to them? If you cringe at the thought of meeting some of the people in that imaginary room, note what it is about them that you’d like to avoid – and re-define your niche to exclude them. You won’t be eliminating potential customers – you’ll be saving yourself time wasted on less-than-ideal prospects. And you’ll find yourself more effortlessly attracting customers in the heart of your niche market.
3. Choose marketing techniques that fit your strengths. Just because every other business owner you know attends networking events, doesn’t mean you have to! If meeting new people in this manner turns you off, don’t waste your time. Maybe you are a great writer – you could write white papers to send to prospects, or a local newspaper column. If you find dealing with your website to be confusing, but are good at speaking, ignore the advice to do a lot of online marketing and instead focus on finding speaking opportunities and turning them into new business.
4. Build your business one customer at a time. Marketing is all about relationships – customers are the people you’ve met, who need what you are offering, and who trust you to deliver it. Every interaction with a potential customer builds that trust (or not). Make sure your staff knows this and treats everyone with respect and patience.
5. Be authentic – be yourself. Building an image that isn’t who you are is a setup for disaster. You’ll be exhausted keeping up the façade…and potential clients will sense the duplicity. You are perfect just the way you are!

Last 5 posts by Terri Zwierzynski

• The Grateful Life of a Solo Entrepreneur - November 17th, 2008
• Can a Lifestyle be a Niche? - November 4th, 2008
• Social Networking: Top 10 Tips for Twitter Success - November 3rd, 2008
• Virtual Book Tour: Becoming an Online Business Manager - October 20th, 2008
• Link correction: Viral Twitter Tactics - October 13th, 2008

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Target Market, Niche Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.