Each person you talk with will have a different world perspective from yours. Each has their own version of reality based on their life views, beliefs, and past experiences. They aren’t looking for you to impose your worldview on them. Rather, they are looking for a solution to their problems that jibes with how they see things.
Marketing is really all about psychology and understanding your prospects and clients. What are their biggest needs, concerns, motivations and behaviors? How do they view life?
The better you can answer those questions, the better you can create marketing materials that your prospects want to read. They want a specialist. They want a trusted adviser who can help them solve their problems. But you have to earn their trust first – before they will listen to you.
So how do you present yourself as a specialist? You tailor your marketing to those specific concerns your prospects are having. If it reads like it could apply to “anyone who needs my products or services,” you’ll sound like every other company out there competing for their business. And if you are perceived as just like “every other company,” why should they pick you if someone else is just as good? Why shouldn’t they ask you to lower your fee?
When you own a niche market and serve it well, you are the obvious choice over all your competitors because you specialize in a particular type of client and become the go-to person for that particular expertise. Niches give you the best chance of succeeding because you master everything there is to know about the frustrations and problems of a specific type of client.
Segmenting Your Market With Demographics and Psychographics
The first step to narrowing your focus and becoming a specialist in a certain niche is to look for what your prospects and clients have in common. There are generally two ways to segment your market: looking at demographics and looking at psychographics. Both will tell you quite a bit of information about your prospects.
- Demographics – These are the basic facts about your prospect such as their age, gender, education, income, job type, and marital status. How a 22-year-old fresh out of college and looking for an entry level job looks at the world is different from a newly retired 65-year-old business executive.
- Psychographics – Psychographics are more about the character, personality or worldview of the individual. For instance, are they optimistic or pessimistic? Do they take control over their life or are they a victim? Are they open- or closed-minded? Where does their sense of self-esteem come from?
Psychographics play a key role in how your prospect will react when you work together. For instance if someone is the “take control of their destiny” type, they will listen to your advice intently and will have done whatever tasks you gave them by the next meeting. Victims, on the other hand, will be more likely to come up with excuses why something wasn’t done. It might be because their dog died or they came down with a cold or something “just came up” and they have to reschedule their meeting with you.
Demographics tend to give you an idea of where your prospects are in life and what major life events might be influencing their decision while psychographics give you an idea of what working with these types of people will be like.
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