There are many tactics a business needs to be successful online. As a matter of fact the digital arena is flooding with all types of tools and tactics. There is an abundance of traffic as well and I will bet that with over 4.5 billion people online (about 59% of the World’s population), the ideal clients of a Coach or Consultant are most likely online. So why do so many businesses still struggle with finding and connecting with their ideal clients?

Here one reason why.

Trust Comes Before A Sale

If you want to sell anything online, you must first get people to trust you. I hope this reason should be quite evident to you. People would not buy from you if they didn’t trust you. People won’t buy from you if they have no reason to expect that they will get the value of whatever they paid. Trust is crucial.

One of the things that build trust in an online context is relevance. In other words, if somebody is looking for a baby carriage and they go to a website where they get all sorts of information regarding baby carriages, the trust level is much higher than if that person went to a different kind of website. I can tell you right now. If that person went to a website that deals with hamburger recipes, the trust level, as far as baby carriage product choices are concerned, would be quite low. Trust requires relevance.

This may be a simple concept to grasp, but it’s not really that simple when you look at trust in the broader context of online sales. Online sales are actually reduced into the KLT process. KLT stands for know-like-trust. For people to trust something, they must first like it. For people to like something, they must first feel that they know it.

You really have your work cut out for you if you’re trying to convert people online because, in the beginning, you start out at the Know stage and you have to shepherd them to the Like stage. You have to also give them enough reasons so they can move on to the Trust stage. Once you have them at the Trust stage, then you have them eating off the palm of your hands. At that stage, you can then start selling.

Again, people will only buy if they trust. This is why it’s really important to know that relevance is crucial to all these stages. By focusing on relevance, meaning giving people the information that they need at the time they need it, you can increase your chances of leading people all the way through the KLT process.

Trust Is Not Enough. Are You Relevant?

As I have mentioned earlier, it’s very hard to get people to take you seriously if you present information to them that they’re not looking for. That information is simply not relevant to their existing needs. This is important to note because, at the Know stage, people are looking for relevance. People are looking for you to give them the information that is related to what they’re looking for. In other words, they’re looking at you to give them enough information for them to know something.

It’s All About Attracting the Right Kind of Attention

Simply showing up with the right information is enough to get you noticed. I know this might sound simple, but you’d be surprised as to how many websites dish out totally irrelevant information. Not surprisingly, they don’t attract the right kind of attention that leads to ultimate conversion.

Know Your Niche

The secret to producing and displaying relevant information, so you can start the process of shepherding people through the KLT process, is actually quite simple. You need to focus on niche. When you understand the niche preference of the people you’re appealing to, then you have half the game taken care of. You have half the battle won.

They are looking for a specific body of information. You only need to present that information in a useful way for them to give you their attention. Once you get their attention, you can then start working on shepherding them through the KLT process.

Niche targeting is the foundation for any kind of effective marketing. I don’t care whether you advertise through search engines, social media, blog posts, or email marketing. You need to have to have a firm grasp of your niche for you to truly make money online. Keep the following ideas in mind so you can maximize your marketing results using the power of niche targeting.

Demand Is Pivotal

Niche targeting isn’t just a simple matter of finding a niche product and looking for traffic for that product. If this is what you’re thinking, rest assured that you are not alone. You are in good company. In fact, a vast number of Coaches and Consultants think exactly this way. They focus on the product or service, and they rack their brains coming up with all sorts of creative traffic-generation tactics to build demand. I hope you see what’s wrong with this picture. You can’t simply INVENT demand-even if you tried!

Tap the power of existing demand

Whenever you are trying to market something, focus on an existing demand. Focus on people who are already demanding certain solutions. Listen to people who have a problem they are trying to fix. This makes the whole process of effective marketing all that much easier because you are simply looking to plug the demand that already exists. Compare this to the more common marketing situation of coming up with some seemingly “hot” product and then scrambling to build demand for it. It’s much harder to do that because it takes a lot more time, effort, and money pulling demand out of thin air.

It’s much better to zero in on existing pools of demand and understand their existing patterns. You then create content to build trust with these pools of demand. Your content guides them through their problems. Their interaction with your content can lead to better ideas for possible solutions. By simply interacting with existing potential customers, you are in a position to craft a solution that they would actually want to buy. Avoid the very common mistake among entrepreneurs of simply imposing a solution on your target audience members.

At the very least, these people would then use your content to go to your target website(s). Focusing on existing demand is a much better way of getting clients than starting from scratch and hoping that your solution will somehow generate demand. By getting your target audience members directly involved in your solution-crafting efforts, you start out the game with a tremendous competitive advantage-you have an existing pool of buyers.