Determining Your Target Market: 6 Ways You’ve Probably Not Considered–Part 3

August 16, 2012 by Lizabeth Phelps

Today, we’re moving to the 3rd post in a 6-part series designed to help you determine whom you should be leading. I expect this will be enlightening and helpful to even the most successful service entrepreneurs.

 3. Who are YOU? BE your market.

Richard Branson was featured yet again in Entrepreneur Magazine, June 2012, and was quoted as saying, “All startups should be thinking, ‘What frustrates me [as a customer] and how can I make it better? It might be a small…or…a big thing, but…if they think like that, they’re likely to build a very successful business.”

The most relevant piece to our discussion is this: he spoke of the fact that he has always been his own customer. Everything he ever created, from Virgin Records to Virgin Airlines and everything in between and after, came from his own need. And he credits “being his own  customer” to his success.

This has now become a topic of conversation between me and my clients who go through my 7-session private program, The Powerhouse Method, looking to build a highly-marketable, one-of-a-kind business. The first order of business is to determine whom they will be serving. To aid in this extremely (for most) challenging act, I tell them what Branson advises: You should be your market. But the converse is equally true: your market should be you. Either who you once were, or who you are now. Do not try marketing to a group you are not. Branson never did. Help those with the same needs you had once upon a time. If you’re frustrated now by how things are being done in your field–close the gap with an innovation and then sell it to others just like you with that need.

When you are your market, and your market is you, you secure one of the most important factors of success in business: credibility. They will listen to you because you are them and have an answer relevant to them. It means you will communicate (i.e. sell) to them like no one else because you speak their language and understand them at a deep level. It means you will design “urgently wanted” programs and products that nail their needs and desires because you know them so intimately.

I have always been my market, and as a result, every one of my programs through the years has knocked it out of the park. I have also always sold quite easily (once I overcame my issues with selling), because I created content *I* would have wanted and that my market (me, in an earlier time) wants and needs.

So, in trying to decide who your market is, look no further than your own mirror.

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