Switch This About Your Marketing, and It Changes Everything
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Here’s a little secret you may not know: If your business isn’t growing as fast as you’d like it to, it may not be the marketing that is the problem. It could be your market.
Case in point — we run a monthly intensive called the Rocket Launch for our coaching clients on launching a profitable Facebook lead-generation funnel. The thing is though, before we can launch Facebook Ads, we have to make sure something very important is correct, and that's the market the message is focused on. Because no matter how good the marketing and funnel are, how high-converting the ads become, how well-written the landing page is or how engaging the follow-up email campaign might be, if the market is wrong, you can never make online advertising work.
So was the case for one of our attendees. He had chosen a sub-section of his niche, which is good, but that particular tribe is notorious for not following through to become successful. No matter how good the coaching would be, there would very few success stories. Instead, this niche would be rich with refunds, dropouts and customer-service nightmares. Not ideal, to say the least.
It isn’t because this niche is lazy. It's because they are distracted with too many things going on in their lives and don’t need or want the change enough. I know because I’ve seen it happen again and again.
The reality is, once we do well, we can do good, but we can’t do it the other way around. Your market has to be one that will spend money with you. Once you generate sales from this niche, you can take that money and do whatever you want and serve any niche you want. But your main business focus cannot be on a niche that is doomed to fail, or your business will never be able to help anyone.
I made this big mistake myself for a long time. The focus of my business used to be the small restaurants and retailers in my town. I was good at marketing for them. They needed my help. The problem was, they could never afford to pay me what I needed to make our business's cash flow. When I flipped our market to ones that could afford it (professional services), I could then give grants to the small businesses in our town and help them grow because I wasn’t relying on them for cash flow.
I could never have done that if I kept them as our primary market. And as an added bonus, I discovered that I love working with those in the professional-services niche more than any other industry, so I found my true passion while I was also successfully growing my firm.
None of this would have happened if I had stayed stuck focusing on a niche that could never rise up to what was needed in order for my company to be successful. Take a good hard look at who you choose to serve, and focus on doing well first, so you can do good after. Both your niche and your business will be better for it.
Entrepreneur Insider Members-Only Content
Subscribe now - just $5 per month
Make smarter business decisions with Entrepreneur Insider. Members get actionable business ideas, best practices and advice from our network of experts, contributors and authors.
Entrepreneur Insider members gain an edge on their competition with:
- Unlimited access to Entrepreneur.com
- Exclusive access to hundreds of educational videos
- Ad-Free Experience
Join us as we discuss different ways that founders can bring something new to the table and how to pivot existing ideas and concepts in the new normal.
Register Now »