The best techniques for marketing conventional businesses are too expensive for home-based businesses. It is impractical for home-based businesses to use those methods unless it is already successful. Applying the five tips below helps any home-based business determine their marketing and sales strategy and thrive when other businesses flounder.
Tip #1: Know Your Buyers!
Many home-based businesses assume that “everyone is a buyer”. It is especially true with Multi-Level Marketing or Network Marketing products. This is the “The Better Mousetrap Trap” syndrome – people will not beat a path to your door even when you have the best, most useful product.
Buyers buy solutions, not products. They buy benefits, not features.
Consider WHO buys your products or services. Which people see your product or service as a solution to their problem? What do they look like? Are they men? Women? Tall? Fat? Energetic? Couch potatoes? Do they like novelty? Old-fashioned stuff? Are they prone to follow trends?
Then look at what benefits or solutions appeal to these buyers. How do THEY describe those benefits? What words get what action?
Discover as much as possible about the people who will buy from you, especially their “action words”.
Tip #2: Use the Action Words!
People do not read or listen well. They scan web pages, advertisements, articles and books. They actively read or hear only a small part of what others say.
Action words make a real difference. Your potential buyers stop scanning or passively listening and pay full attention to your message.
Until you get this level of attention, you do not have a buyer, even if they seem to agree with your message.
Sprinkle your message with those action words!
Tip #3: NEVER use future tenses and avoid the past tense!
The subconscious mind makes the decisions. The conscious mind may require data to rationalize the decision, and you must give that information, but it does not decide on anything. You can appeal to the conscious mind all you want, but, in the end, you will not get the buyer to buy!
The subconscious mind ignores the past and cannot “see” the future. It sees and acts on the NOW. Once it reaches a decision, it works as if the action has happened. If the subconscious decides to buy, it does not matter if the actual delivery and payment is next week, next month or next year.
Use the action words – they are a direct link to the buyer’s subconscious mind, and they will always be ready to buy when you get there
Tip #4: Get Out Of The House Trap!
You may call it a “home-based business”, but decide RIGHT NOW that your real business place is NOT in your home office. It is on the streets, in other people’s homes, at cafes, your hairdresser’s, the supermarket, the shopping mall and anywhere there are people.
Don’t wait for the phone to ring. Don’t wait for orders to come pouring down from the Web. People buy from people.
Go where your buyers are. If you are there when their subconscious decides to buy, you get the sales. By being there, you are doing the marketing!
Tip #5: ASK!
ASK people to look at your solution.
ASK them how they can do without your product or service.
ASK them to pay for it.
ASK the buyers what you can add to their purchase.
ASK them to come to your home office, even if it is a web page or your kitchen/dining room table.
The number one reason for failure is that people DON’T ASK. The reluctance to ASK causes them to close themselves off in their home-based office, to talk about the future or the past rather than the present, to use words that avoid commitment or action and to never determine who their buyers might be.
There’s an old adage: “if you want to succeed, do what the failures don’t do”. Well, failures in home-based businesses don’t follow the five tips you have just seen….
