Have you developed a strategy to market your MLM products and business opportunity? Who are you targeting? What do they want? Where can they be found? What pitches will appeal to them? Long term success in the MLM industry is predicated on knowing the answers to these questions inside and out.
While you can create 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 tactic unless you get super lucky. It's OK to gamble on the side, but the majority of your time should be spent on executing a specific marketing strategy.
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. First establish the WHAT (strategizing), then work on the HOW (planning). Take, for example, the case of telecommunications sales. You could choose to target customers of a certain carrier with bad service in the area. That is the WHAT - the marketing strategy. In order to reach them, you might design a web page using your city name and the carrier's name as keywords and include a 'send me info on reducing my bill' opt-in box. 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.
Do you need a clear Marketing strategy to acheive MLM Success?"
In a word - YES.
Proper marketing creates a desire for a service or product. To do this, you must connect to a goal the prospect wants to achieve. Once a prospect sees that your product is the solution to a specific problem that they care about, there should be no further objections as you close them.
1. What issues do people care about?
Always start with a problem that people worry about and work backwards. 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 telecommunications services people buy anyway? Do they help slow the aging process? Do they teach search engine optimization? Do they reduce cholesterol?
Remember, it has to be a problem people care about. And, they must care enough about the problem to take action. Someone whose doctor has just told them they have high cholesterol is generally ready to act. Someone that was charged $40 in overage fees last month is hopefully ready to act. Someone whose brother just got hurt and cannot work is probably ready to act. A network marketer struggling to generate leads in the cold market is probably ready to act.
2. Which problems should your marketing strategy target?
After you list all the problems that your products and services can solve, get specific about which you will target. Pick 1 to 3 problems to target. numerous factors go into making this decision. The pivotal factors you'll want to evaluate are:
1) The number of people with the issue. How large is the market?
2) The magnitude of the problem. How motivated are people to solve the problem?
3) The competition. How many other competing solutions are there for this issue?
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 last sentance describes most network marketers making them one of your best target markets in most cases.
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 determine where you'll find your target customers in the strategy phase. Can you reach them? If yes, what are those groups and where do these people hang out.
The Internet is one of several answers to this question and for most network marketers it is the most powerful answer. The Internet is full of niches of people expressly 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 long distance calling'? Next look at how many other pages you are competeing with for each issue.
Lots of newbies waste an enormous amount of time and money designing web pages that nobody visits because they don't invest in truly learning Internet marketing. Please don't begin until you comprehend the basics of searching. It is possible to be on the first page of Google, but it requires a focused niche strategy to do it.
Andrea Kropp is an authority on Attraction Marketing and its role in achieving MLM Success. Andrea solves network marketers' two main problems...lack of leads and lack of early cash flow... through a self-funding model of online and offline MLM Marketing techniques applicable to any network marketing business.
