When I first started in local marketing, every course I read said “you gotta work with bigger marketing budgets”. That makes sense, of course, because you need to charge enough to get paid, but it also narrows the field down a hell of a lot. Which is why you see the same recommend niches mentioned ad nauseam:
This instantly sat wrong with me in two ways, one being I didn’t want to compete with everyone else trying to sell the same few prospects …and the other being how I really wanted to help the truly ‘small guys’ too. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of leaving out all the little restaurants, bakeries, contractors, boutiques, etc. that don’t have thousands a month to spend right away. Also, not for nothing, but those “big budget” businesses are way harder to reach decision makers.
If you’re just starting out it’s kind of unfair to be expected to solely work with the most difficult-to-reach owners and then expect them to spend thousand with you when you have no track record or reputation! While I agree most small businesses do need help with marketing it’s not like they’re all begging for someone to come to their door and save them. Remember, these guys are pounded endlessly by marketers every day.
Note: If you’re doing marketing for businesses nation-wide, then it makes sense to strictly target specific ones capable of spending a good deal of money right off the bat because you have a huge pool to choose from. But if you’re building an agency in your backyard, you shouldn’t have to refuse the vast majority of businesses in your area … the small mom n pop type ones who, honestly, really could use a miracle when it comes to marketing.
If you’ve been around my courses for a while, you’ll know that most of my systems allow you to work with businesses of all sizes because they’re so much easier to prospect and often much more rewarding to work with as you can see growth so quickly and effortlessly. Which brings me to my next point …
This is really important to understand. It’s something I feel 95% of local marketers have yet to discover, and they’re really missing out.
Fact is:
It’s WAY easier to get people to come into a restaurant or bakery than it is a chiropractor or car dealership. As local independent marketers, we often live or die based on whether we can get results for our clients or not, don’t we? So why are we only focusing on the hardest-to-generate-response niches and passing by all the ones that make it easy?
I’ll tell you the simple reason why … because there’s not much marketing you can do out there for small budgets that can still get response. Despite what anyone might tell you, it’s not exactly easy to take sub-$1000/month budgets and produce response for these higher ticket niches.
Give 98% of all local marketers a budget of $500 or less for any restaurant/bakery/boutique/etc and they won’t have a clue what to do that could legitimately bring response and net the marketer a profit.
This is exactly why you need to use my postcard systems, so you can take as low as $35 from any business and give them something with a real chance of results. Most of my postcard systems work best in the $250-$500 range but New Mover Cards, which this course is all about … is actually designed to work in the $50 or less range. Which is unheard of.
The businesses with the lowest marketing budgets are often who you can get the highest response for. This is because they usually sell low-ticket, frequently bought products or services. I love these businesses because it falls more under “advertising” than “marketing”. A bakery for example won’t need a tremendous amount of creative effort to generate customers for … a simple coupon advertised is more than enough to work!
Fun story:
I once had this particular a**hole of a marketer in my area write me a pissy facebook message saying that I was an idiot for doing all this marketing for businesses he knew were “broke” and a waste of time. Said that he’d rather have one client paying $2,500/month than twenty paying $200. I wrote him back thanking him for his feedback and concern.
Let me tell you something about having twenty clients (which is easy to get using my postcard systems!) … There’s hardly any stress because the stakes aren’t high, they renew easily, the fulfillment is next to minimal, and I don’t give one crap if some of them drop off for a while. And guess what, some of those small-payers turn into big-payers for other services. Now how’s the feeling when you’re one $2,500 client decides to stop working with you and a third or half or all of your income suddenly vanishes!