When I first thought of how to market my business, ideas for how to do it were things like.. print a brochure of flier, run an ad, send out some postcards. But I later discovered that’s actually upside down and is the last of 3 steps in an effective marketing strategy.

Many marketing efforts fail because they don’t follow the right order of things. We often focus on the fancy glossy brochures, and the image we project. I’m not against creating an image, by the way, but for small business owners, image is not the most important thing. We can leave that to giant companies with colossal marketing budgets. They can afford to focus countless dollars on “image-marketing.”

As small business owners, our marketing budgets are often limited. So when we implement a marketing strategy, the goal has to be “How can I get my ideal clients to take action, respond, get to know me and my business, and choose to do business with me?”

Logos and fancy brochures may get you some oohs and aahs from friends, family, business acquaintances and even prospects, but they are rarely set up to accomplish the goal of increasing business.

From my experience, here’s the most effective order of things for implementing your marketing actions:

1) Who: When you think of marketing your business, the first thing to think about is the profile of the person to whom you are targeting – your target market. Who are they, what’s their greatest need in your area of expertise, and how do they express that need. The answers are what you put into your marketing.

2) What: And what you put into your marketing is the message that is specifically tailored to your target audience. That message must resonate so strongly with their problems that they prompted into action. Action that makes them pick up the phone, go to your web site, etc.

3) How: The how is the tool you use to convey the message to your market. The tool or the media is the postcard, the flyer, the ad, etc. If you do not first know your target market, then the message will be weak which then makes the tool/media ineffective. Often people say things like “postcards don’t work” when the marketing process actually failed in steps 1 and 2 above.

When you finally get to step 3 where you are choosing the tool to reach your target market, the question to ask is “What action do I want them to take?” And your tool (flier, postcard, ad, etc) must lead them directly into taking that desired action. Don’t leave it up to the reader to figure it out. Specifically say things like “Call now for ….” “Click here to…” “Go to for…” Always end with a “call to action.”

There’s more to network marketing than just constantly giving out strategies, and tactics.

A lot of network marketing has to do with mindset.

One of those aspects of mindset are extremely important and imperative to carrying out any of the strategies that you may learn.

What May Be the Most Important Network Marketing Advice for Making Any Strategy Useful

One of the things that I’ve noticed in my twenty five years in the network marketing industry is that people often come into this business without a very good reason. They come in very aimless way. They have no real direction of why they’ve joined other than it just seemed like a good idea at the time…and a way to make a lot of money according to their upline sponsor.

But that’s really no way to start out on any venture.

It’s almost a recipe for disaster in fact.

The fact is that PURPOSE is extremely important in any venture that you partake. When it comes to network marketing advice, it’s one of the pieces of advice that I give out the most. Very likely because I’ve seen first hand how not having a sense of direction and purpose can be the ultimate death to any network marketing dream.

Purpose is defined by Merriam-Webster as “something set up as an object or end to be attained”…

That last word is very important. What is it that you hope to attain from starting this venture into network marketing? What were you thinking about when you signed up?

Was it making tons of money? That’s perfectly fine if it was. That’s a great purpose, if that’s what you want. But sometimes you have to dig a little deeper to get to the real reason of your purpose.

You have to ask a lot of WHY questions.

Why do you want more money? Why will this help you? What will you use that money for? (okay so that last one isn’t a “Why” question)

Many people are shocked when they do this exercise because they realize that the purpose that they thought they had wasn’t really even their purpose at all. For instance many people realize that what they would do is quit their job so that they can spend more time with their family. So, the money is just a vehicle for what they really want, which is time freedom. They want to be able to do what they want, when they want, without having to get permission from a boss to do so.

Others realize that they just want to make enough money so they never have to feel the stress of debt and where they’re going to pay the next bill. While others want to be able to pay their debts, plus the debts of those that they love, and/or the debts of those in their church.