One of the most frequently asked questions of new Home Based Business Owners is, “Colleen, what are the marketing strategies you recommend and how many different marketing strategies should I be using?”
With as many marketing strategies to use, as there are home based businesses, it is best to begin with 1-3 strategies in the beginning. More than that can be overwhelming leave you only being mediocre at best in terms of using the various tools and getting mediocre results.
The goal of marketing is to become a marketing wizard in a just a few areas. You will eventually find your niches that you enjoy the most and which yield you the most results – that’s what we’re after right? Results.
On Discovery Channel you can watch a show called The Deadliest Catch. It shadows crab fishermen navigating the icy, cold, Arctic seas in order to catch their quotas of millions of dollars worth of crab. This is their passion. They know the seas like a small town fisherman knows the riverbeds in his county.
They took these Deadliest Catch Fishermen to Colorado for interviews. They went fly fishing. Very few of them enjoyed it and even fewer of them could master the fly fisherman’s cast.
Likewise, I bet we’d be hard pressed to find fly fishermen willing to jump on board a crab fishing vessel.
Become an expert in a few strategies.
You want to learn everything you can from the gurus of the niches you have selected. There are always in -depth tips and and tricks for every strategy. The more expert you are, the better you can navigate and master your marketing strategies and train others in your areas of niche marketing. Listen to all of the training calls, purchase their materials. Learn from the people who have mastered the areas that you wish to master.
Undercut Vs. Shortcut
Undercut your own learning curve. Don’t take short cuts. There is a difference. Undercutting means you are shortening the learning curve by learning from the experience of others. Shortcutting means you are chopping off what could be valuable chunks of strategies to save time and be more efficient. Shortcuts can cost you time and money and yield less than stellar results. Undercutting can yield you high returns faster because you are learning the skills that took someone else years to acquire. See the difference?
Are Your Strategies Duplicatable By the Masses?
You want to pick strategies that are duplicatable and yield high returns for both you and your team. Think to yourself, “Can anyone I sponsor do this? Is this marketing strategy going to yield high results for those distributors that are doing network marketing part time?” What is the learning curve and how quickly can my new Distributors get up and running with these strategies? How quickly will new Distributors see results? Can they get immediate results?”
The goal is residual income. Residual income is income earned off of the efforts of other people. If you want to earn a lot of income from a lot of other people then it only makes sense to use & teach strategies that are duplicatable by lots of people and can bring in large amounts of leads and sales as quickly as possible… and don’t forget quality here.
You want quality leads and quality customers. Yes, its a numbers game, but you want quality in numbers! Not every fish caught is a keeper. Some are thrown back.
Not every person is right for network marketing. Mastering your strategy so you attract more leaders and “keepers” should be your marketing goal.
Your team will be filled with all kinds of people having all kinds of time constraints and all levels of skills. If you keep this in mind you will find yourself using strategies that will make you and your team successful, faster.
What Strategies Do I Recommend?
Direct Response is a Must. Direct response always gives you the fastest response and the quickest lead flow. Quantity then Quality.
You will find the Quality amongst the Quantity when you have a good lead generation funnel as part of your Direct Response program. Quality people will sift and sort themselves in your funnel system and end up on your team. For more on funnels read the book Secrets of the 1% Club.
The only other rule is to pick something that you love. If you love it, you will love doing it and want to do it with consistency. When you are passionate about something you want to do it everyday for a long time. The key to any marketing strategy is consistency over a period of time.
You cannot put flyers on cars in a large parking lot one Saturday afternoon and expect your phone to ring off the hook. You have to become known as “the Fly Guy”. You learn from other flyer gurus. Learn what color paper to use, what headlines are eye catching and what offers people will respond to. Learn what days of the week, times of the day and which parking lots yield the highest return rate.
I am not recommending flyers. I am using this as an example that if you have a strategy which you truly love and you are passionate about then become an expert in that one area.
A colleague of mine built a multi-million dollar business in post cards. Her name is Joyce Gendusa and she owns PostCard Mania. She loves post cards and lives by the marketing secret that ‘Outflow is Greater than Inflow”. I have used her postcard concept and postcards do get results… if you do them in a very precise and correct way. She became an expert in postcards. While many people will shun postcards, my friend Joyce loves them, has built a hugely successful business with them and helps thousands of small businesses increase sales revenues with postcards.
She became an expert in her field and if you use her services you can get responses from postcards. She loves postcards. Not everyone does, but she does and she has millions of dollars in her pocket as a result of perfecting a marketing tool that she loves.
Do What you Love and the Money Will Follow
If you have a certain passion that you find, just follow it and encourage your new Distributors to do the same.
When you love doing a certain action you will do it with passion every day and you will love learning about it. When you encourage your Distributors to pick one or two strategies that they are passionate about and encourage them to become experts at those strategies you will end up with a team of leaders who are experts in their particular marketing endeavors.
Leaders breed leaders and passion breeds more passion.
Pretty sound marketing advice don’t you think?
For a list of marketing resources, be sure to check out the Resources section.