3 Questions to Help You Find and Serve Your Market
So you want to start a membership site? Awesome!
Now… what do you do first?
Typically, the first follow-up question is: do you have an audience, or not? In the beginning, your path to success depends on how you answer this question.
If you don’t have an audience yet—and we all have to start there-there are a few things that you absolutely need to do to get your membership off on the right foot.
3 Questions to Identify Your Market
1. Identify the audience you want to serve.
To communicate well, you need to know who you’re talking to.
If you started speaking a little English, a little French, a little Mandarin, a little Japanese—hoping to spread your net wide—you’d end up attracting no one and confusing everyone. 🙂
Because here’s the reality: when it comes to marketing, the more specific you are about who you want to serve, the easier it is for you to attract them.
For example, Susan Garrett is a dog trainer—and a world-class one at that. But when she first started, she did not focus on dog training in general, which is an enormous market.
What she focused on was dog agility, a segment within a segment, and was able to speak specifically to that market. After all, it’s not the common pet owner who wants to train a dog to be more agile.
Even when the founder of TRIBE, Stu McLaren, started a membership site, his goal was to help all business owners. But that was so broad and general, it was hard to get any traction. He found himself competing against many other people.
However, when he zoned in on the one thing he was really good at—helping people launch, grow, and scale membership sites—Whoa, Nelly! Everything took off!
2. Find 5 to 10 problems your market faces.
Without this knowledge, it’s going to be difficult, not only from a marketing standpoint but also from a content delivery standpoint. A little bit of research goes a long way.
How do you find problems? You go into places like Facebook groups, Google groups, or wherever your market gathers. Pay attention to the questions people are asking. Where are they getting stuck? What are they getting hung up on?
Those are the 5 to 10 problems that you want to identify.
3. Become known for something specific and start serving people.
When going into a market, the more specific you are with who you serve and how you help, the easier it is for people to refer you.
So the best way to become known for something specific is to start serving in that space.
Start showing up. Start helping people.
Once you’ve identified the problems that the market faces, now is your opportunity to get in there and start solving them. You can help people with your own advice, or you can help people just by pointing them to the advice of others. Be a resource. Help them make progress.
We talk a lot about becoming known for something specific. In fact, if you’ve ever listened to the Marketing Your Business podcast, which you have, right? If you haven’t, what the heck are you waiting for? Go and download the Marketing Your Business podcast, specifically episode number 79, where we talk about making easy sales.
What to Do When You Already Have an Audience
If you DO already have an audience, you’ve already got momentum on your side. So the steps for you are pretty straightforward.
1. Pick a date.
Nothing happens until you’ve got a date on the calendar. There’s nothing more motivating than an on-coming deadline.
So pull out your planner—or phone app or whatever you’d like—and pick a day not too far away, but far enough to give you time to work.
And then….
2. Cast the vision.
What do you see this membership and community becoming?
When you cast the vision for your audience, the key thing here is that you’ve got to realize it’s not about you, it’s all about your audience.
How will this membership serve them?
The question that we like to answer when casting our own vision is this: how will an audience member’s life be better or different as a result of this membership?
If you can answer that specifically you’re going to have a great time when it comes to really casting that vision, and you’ll enjoy the support of the people in your audience.
3. Invite them to become founding members.
This is where a lot of people get hung up because they think they need everything just right before launch. Don’t worry, it’s not true. It doesn’t need to be perfect!
In fact, Nicholas Wilton invited his audience of artists to join him on a webinar and was totally transparent with them. He said, “Look, this is what I’m thinking of creating… ” He described the community (which didn’t even exist), its membership, what it all included, and how everyone would benefit and grow.
He asked, “So how can we keep this awesome community that we’ve gathered going on a continual basis?” He then invited them to become founding members—with special perks and bonuses for making the first step.
Here’s the crazy part about Nicholas’s story: of the 200+ people that were on the call, over 180 of them signed up!
He enjoyed an enormous conversion because he wasn’t afraid to cast a big vision and invited them to join as founding members.
So as you can see, it doesn’t matter whether you have an audience or don’t have an audience yet. You’ve got your next steps to start your very own membership site.
So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started!
