Leverage your strengths

Experienced marketers know that being specific about your offerings and your audience is crucial for professional success. Segmentation, targeting and positioning are not some abstract concepts any more. Instead, these three activities form the basis for any successful attempt at grabbing the public's attention. Knowing what, how and to whom to make an offer will get you a job, a donation, a sale, or even all three, if you're looking for that. With that said, finding the right audience and that unique feel can take quite a long time, and most of us don't have years to wait for such an epiphany before getting what we want. Today, Nick and I prepared a three-step outline to ease and, hopefully, accelerate the journey to our readers' goals.

Find your niche

The segmentation and targeting that marketers always talk about is simply about finding the niche that you choose for your endeavor.

Let's take an example: Josh wants to open a restaurant with only one thing on the menu. He needs to choose the menu item depending upon the group that he targets. After some research, Josh finds out that the population surrounding his restaurant-to-be is divided into three clear groups: men, women and children. Men like steak; women like salads, and children like pie. After some serious contemplation, Josh picks men as his target group, and puts "prime rib steak" as the one item on his restaurant's menu.

Of course, I simplified the example as much as I could, but the message is that a sure way to increase the chances for a sale starts with dividing the marketing into groups and picking the target out of the resulting segments.

Master your core skills

Once you choose the audience with which to work, it's time to strengthen the skills that you would need to have a professional relationship with your target group. What I mean by that is, determine what skills you need to sell your product to the particular customer you chose. If you are looking for a job and chose small-scale computer repair firms as your target, you might want to bush up on your knowledge of Windows and Mac. If you make custom typewriters for a living, and you've chosen the urban youth as your target, you might want to make sure that your typewriters are portable and convey a sense of confidence to the world, and so on. A very important portion of this step is understanding exactly what skills your target audience cares about. Once you've understood that, mastering them should come with little effort.

Nurture supporters

Finally, if you are in the business of making sales (and we all are,) the supporters of your endeavors are your biggest treasure that can lead to word-of-mouth sales, making your advertising viral, converting the half-convinced and spreading the knowledge about you to places where you cannot reach. You should definitely pay close attention to who they are, since most of them will not explicitly share their sympathy with you. Nevertheless, most supporters will only need a little additional interaction with you before they become your devoted promoters.

Yes, the process of finding your professional voice can be tough. However, we highly encourage our readers to stay persistent at searching and trying out different scenarios. It took Nike, the sports shoe corporation, almost a decade to find their line of marketing that got them heard and adored by a wide audience internationally. As you, too, go through the steps above and through all the other steps that you conquer on your way to your goals, remember not to give up, and keep in mind that Nick and I are here to help you with advice any time you are unsure about the next action. Comment, subscribe, and stay in touch. We believe in you.