It’s important to be focused in many aspects of your work when you’re self-employed and if you’re into every marketing channel out there you’re probably wasting a big chunk of that time and effort.
You see, far too many self-employed people are of the belief that you have to be everywhere online (or into every marketing channel) to get noticed.
But that’s simply not the case.
Watch this short video about why you shouldn’t be wasting time trying to be everywhere and what you can do to make sure you’re on the right channels.
But here’s the crux of the matter:
Your target market won’t be everywhere.
It’s almost a certainty that your target market will have a preferred social channel and/or place to hang out.
For example, if you sell business-to-business services then Linkedin would be a good place to be since your target market (of businesses) will be there.
TikTok, on the other hand, will be a complete waste of time because it’s predominantly young people (at time of writing) and very few of them will be in business.
Also, using email to reach young people isn’t a good choice since many younger people will use other channels such as snapchat. But email works very well when selling to businesses.
Going to business events is also a good way to sell to other businesses, but will be mostly a non-starter if you’re trying to reach consumers.
Another example of bad targeting is trying sell makeup in a sport magazine or on a sport website. Largely because the majority of people who visit sport websites (and read sport magazines) are men.
That doesn’t mean that nobody from your target market will be there, it’s just that they’ll be there in such small numbers that it won’t be a cost-effective (or time-effective) channel to use.
So, the channels you spend the most time and money on should be entirely based on where your target market hangs out.
Do the research about where they are, and go there. Anything else will largely be a complete waste of time.
Want more on marketing? Check out :
Competence Is Not Enough To Convince Someone To Buy From You (blog post)
Why it’s a good idea to start with a small number of marketing channels (podcast)