Figuring out the ideal niche for your business and building a strategy uniquely suited to the audience of that niche may be the single most important aspects of success in business, according to entrepreneur and successful internet marketer Alex Jeffreys.
"If you speak to everybody, then you speak to nobody," Jeffreys explained.
When you understand who the customers are for your niche, you then understand the unique challenges, objectives, and aspirations of those customers and clients. From there, you can put together a strategy or product to guide those specific customers through their personal pitfalls to final goals.
Without this understanding, a business lacks the necessary tools to build the products and marketing people want. Products may end up ‘good enough’ but don’t build excited, loyal customer bases. They don’t change lives or build empires.
Big Steps to Success
Jeffreys refers to the process of moving from pain points to glory as the Big Steps to Success: The steps necessary to guide a particular individual from their current pains to the glory they desire. It’s important to understand personal pain points and personal goals for this: Generic pains won’t resonate, generic solutions won’t work and generic glories won’t satisfy.
To help budding entrepreneurs find their way through this process, Jeffreys teaches the process through a coaching program designed to train businesses to find their target audience online and via >social networks. According to Jeffreys, the coaching process aids both parties. As the entrepreneur works through the Big Steps to Success and learns to help their clients effectively, the coach gains confidence and develops further along their own set of Steps.
Using this same process, Jeffreys nurtured his own multi-million dollar coaching business from a much smaller-scale coaching program. He used the same process of self-analysis and customer analysis to revitalize his business and turn it into his dream job and a great opportunity for his clients.
Turning understanding into branding and messaging
One area businesses fall short lay in the application of understanding their niche to more than a product. Effective leverage means building a product that appeals to the right niche and surrounding that product with effective marketing. A product launch that never reaches the clients its best tailored to can’t succeed. It's important to put together a message that will convince those ideal customers to take action.
Jeffreys refers to what he calls ‘power content’ as the core of modern online marketing. Power content tailored to your niche works on multiple levels to promote your business. Blog posts, video content, articles, social media posts, this sort of content used effectively teaches clients who you are, helps them understand what you can do and guides them to your website.
Perhaps more importantly, good content builds lasting trust and authority you can leverage throughout your relationship with consumers. By using power content in this way, you find yourself in a position where taking action you propose just makes sense — and the customer isn’t calling as a skeptic, but as someone who already trusts your brand because of the role you have played in educating and informing them. Ultimately, this relationship leads to an increase in sales.
Jeffreys recommends entrepreneurs learn to combine data gleaned from advertising platforms and analytics tools with their existing in-depth knowledge of their target clients to achieve optimal results. That means delivering the right branding and messaging to the right people with the right channels and timing. A perfect advertisement to convince one customer to try your product may drive off a different customer, so understanding how different audiences react gives a massive opportunity to shape the perception of your products.
Achieving this has become far easier with the rise of advanced online advertising platforms integrating tools for marketing automation and careful personalization. In particular, Jeffreys recommends the rapidly developing Facebook marketing tools, which combine a rich understanding of audiences with an abundance of tools for controlling who sees what messages.
Advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook already have the in-depth understanding of their users that you need to deliver marketing materials accurately. If a business does the research and analysis to figure out who out there will be most receptive to marketing materials, it’s now trivial to leverage these platforms to get those messages where they need to go.
It’s more than just better targeting ads — it creates a resonance and excitement to follow through that you can’t get with generic advertising or a weak understanding of your niche and customer base.
"It's like when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, right?" Jeffreys explains. "They're like, 'Wow! This is exactly what I'm looking for, wow!'"
Alex Jeffreys is the owner and founder of Marketing With You, an internet marketing coaching program dedicated to teaching individuals how to market their businesses online. With successful products such as the Super Funnel program and the Affiliate Sniper program, Alex Jeffreys has helped hundreds of students gain success.
