More and more people are being drawn to home based business undertakings today. For these individuals it is imperative that they learn to adequately generate home based business leads. The ability to generate leads for your home based business could mean the difference between thriving or dying in today’s competitive market. The advertising and marketing for a home based business shares similar principles to that of a major corporation, but the deployment and methodologies are very different.
The first place that any home business owner should start with is a thorough knowledge of the target market. For example a home based cake decorating business would want to understand who their primary customers are going to be. Some examples of a target market include: engaged couples, parents with young children and civic organizations that conduct regular fund raising activities. Knowing your target market will help guide you through the rest of the lead generation process.
The next consideration for generating home based business leads is where to connect with the target market. Using the illustration of the cake decorator, let’s assume that the business owner is targeting the wedding cake market. Their points of connection would need to be places where engaged couples would be researching wedding preparations. A brief list of connecting points would include tuxedo shops, wedding dress shops, limousine services, DJ services and local churches.
From this point the business owner would want to introduce their home based business to key people in each of these locations as a resource for couples planning their weddings. It would be appropriate to leave brochures, business cards and even photographs of cakes that can be shown as an example. Someone really wanting to put some power to their home based business lead generation would actually take a sample of one of their cakes as a “gift” for each of these contacts. The key to this strategy is to create synergy with other business owners. By making a strong impression, these business owners essentially become a sales force to the target market on behalf of the home based business owner.
Another strategy for generating leads for your home based business is to offer value to those in your target market. For example this same cake decorator might produce a small brochure on the top 10 mistakes to avoid when planning your wedding. This brochure would have a tagline, that showed it was being provided courtesy of the home based cake decorating business.
These previous strategies involve localized and face to face marketing. Now lets consider a variation on the previous strategies for a business that was wanting to use the internet for generating home based business leads. In this example we’ll use a home based business that sells cleaning products. The principles of identifying a target market are the same. In this example we’ll assume that our business owner has chosen to target people who are looking for environmentally friendly cleaning products.
In this scenario our business owner would begin by finding community groups online that deal with “green” living. The business owner would include their website in their forum signature, and would make regular informative posts on the benefits of using organic cleaning products. The business owner would also want to create a small report listing 5 things to look for in an environmentally friendly cleaning product. This report would be offered freely to anyone who is interested. Those who participate in the forum discussions with the business owner and those who request the free report are all examples of home based business leads that have been generated from taking a few small steps.
Generating home based business leads is easy when you follow the basic principles of relationship building in your marketing efforts. These strategies can be implemented for both online and offline home based businesses.
