Welcome Guest Blogger today:

Darin McCall from liveyourfuturevision.com

Only marketing efforts through attraction marketing have definitely proven to be very effective at increasing our business growth.   So that being said, it’s obvious that we’ll likely continue to pursue these types of marketing efforts to attract new prospects to us.  However there are also a multitude of additional offline marketing ideas that we can do directly within our own community that can effectively target the appropriate audience as well.  In this article I’ll share with you one of the practices I like to employ when I am out and about.  But before I do, let me tell you where I was originally failing and my eye opening experience.

Before I started heavily marketing online through attraction marketing I was focusing my efforts by marking within my own community in the ‘real world’.  That means, when not on the Internet for those of you that are always plugged in.  I struggled for some time to determine how to attract the proper audience for simply having an opportunity to talk about my business.  Long story short, I did some reading and looked outside of the normal network marketing methods for marketing suggestions.  I learned that my message of, “I’m selling product X and you can join my opportunity to make money” messages were making it quickly into everyone’s trash.  Sound familiar?

What I learned made a huge difference in my offline (and online) marketing efforts and actually served as a huge turning point for my business.  What did I learn?  That I wasn’t selling my product, I was selling solutions.  Did you get that?  Let me say it one more time a little differently.

I am selling a solution to another person’s problem instead of selling a product or an opportunity to someone that has no need for a solution.

Face to face interactions were easy as I would simply ask a lot of questions and have a conversation with someone before determining what their issue was and identifying that I have a solution for them and then providing that solution.  But how could I do that in the offline marketing world to drive my business?

I decided that I had to have my offline marketing campaign target a specific audience.  When I targeted a specific audience, those that my marketing was directed to had a greater chance of being captured by their attention.  Those that weren’t my target audience would simply discard or ignore my marketing efforts and I let them.  Because who cares, they weren’t my target market and I couldn’t sell them anything anyway.

What exactly is a ‘target market’?  Consider this, someone has a cut on their finger and I’m an antiseptic and bandage salesperson.  My message to a group of people is, “Do you have a cut on your finger?  Are you scared of infection or worse?  I can keep your finger from getting infected so you don’t lose that finger!  Contact me…” Here you see my marketing efforts are targeted to a specific group of people, those with cuts on their fingers, or perhaps cuts anywhere.  My solution, since I’m selling solutions, is providing a way for the person to keep their finger from getting infected so they don’t lose that finger.  Silly example I know but I think you get my point.

I created roughly about 50 brochures with my favorite word processor on my computer and printed these out.  All with a message that identified specific group of people that may have needed additional income to pay bills, save for vacations, get ahead with finances, and so forth.  That’s a pretty wide net simply because it’s very rare to find someone that has so much money that they don’t know what to do with it.  The solution I provided was that I could teach them how they could potentially earn additional money on top of their current income and that it wouldn’t interfere with what they were doing.  Then gave value to my message by suggesting that I and my team would work closely with those that were interested and that full support would be provided.  And lastly, my message suggested to the audience that there was no obligation to buy anything at all.

These brochures were dropped off at super markets display boards, slipped into a few newspaper boxes at apartment complexes, and even a few left on the checkout counters of a few businesses that I had built reputations with.  All neatly displayed with an eye capturing message of some type that caused someone to look, and then continue to read.  It wasn’t long before I started getting phone calls asking for more information.

There’s no sales marketing sales funnel that I’m aware of that could be implemented offline.   Though I’m sure you could likely direct people to a website that will take them to a capture page if that was your main goal.  This method however allowed me to establish and build a relationship directly with my prospects that contacted me.  I asked the right questions such as why they decided to contact me or what was going on that they needed additional income.  Then I provided my solution of providing other people solutions.  My network marketing opportunity only being a means to an end, and was positioned to work with people directly and build some great business relationships.

That being said, and our need to build our businesses without breaking the bank.  There actually is one last item I could share.  Mike Dillard over at Magnetic Sponsoring put together some pretty great videos that has amazing information that I have used myself to build my business.  Hey, best thing, these videos are FREE so check them out by clicking here > www.MLMBudgetStartup.com <

Thanks!

Darin McCall