Finding your niche market can be the most difficult step in your niche marketing strategy.
That’s why it’s important to choose a niche that you can easily contact. All expert direct marketers will tell you that your mailing list is the most important part of your entire direct marketing campaign (let alone your business). If you can’t easily and affordably contact a niche market, you shouldn’t be marketing to it.
The key to finding the people in your niche market is to think about who else markets to the same niche and look to them to help you compile your list. It is very possible that they will rent their list to you or you could offer them a commission from every product or service that you sell as a result of using their list.
An Example of Finding Doctors
Suppose that you wanted to market to doctors in your city. You could just go to the yellow pages, but sending a letter or offer to their place of business may not get a very high response rate because it will usually go through an assistant who will screen out all non-business type mail.
Here are some ideas to get access to their home addresses:
• Get an electronic copy of the yellow pages. These are sold in stores like CompUSA. Get the names of the doctors from the yellow pages and look them up in the white pages. You may be able to match their names and legal titles
(example, Dr. John Davis or John Davis M.D.). This will be time consuming so you may want to get a high school student to help you.
• Go to the Oxbridge Directory of Publications. This reference manual contains demographics information on over 20,000 magazines and newsletters. You’ll be able to find publications that reach specific markets, which have the
characteristics you want. For example, you might discover a magazine like
“Physician’s Lifestyle”, a bi-monthly publication that reaches every single medical doctor in the country.
• Go to your local library and browse through the Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) list directory. In it you’ll find just about every mailing list known to man. It is an invaluable tool for your niche marketing efforts. You will find lists of doctors that have purchased recently through direct mail.
• Contact the organizations and associations that doctors belong to such as the American Medical Association or your state medical association. If the associations won’t rent you a list then ask if you can get a list of magazines, journals and publications that cater to the medical community. Magazines are very good sources for renting lists.
• Go to MediaFinder.com and search for media such as newsletters, magazines, journal, periodicals and other media that are targeted toward the medical community and doctors specifically. A couple of references I found at MediaFinder.com were the APPA Digest, which is the publication for the association on financial planning for doctors. Another media was the Allergy Hotline Newsletter, which is a newsletter for doctors and other medical professionals that treat allergies.
• You can also work through local mailing list brokers or better known brokers such as www.BestMailing.com or www.MailersSoftware.com, which have lists of all kinds of doctors that live across the country. One list I looked at was for the state of Texas, which included 30,091 medical doctors. A list broker can help you find the type of list for which you are searching. However, list brokers usually make their money off of large mailing lists and may be less helpful but they might steer you in the right direction. They eat, sleep, and drink mailing lists.
o NOTE: Every one should have a good list broker. My personal list broker is Gil Terriberry and his company is Direct Contact Marketing Group and he can be reached at 877-262-8105 or you can email him at
dcmg@dcmg.com.
What If You Can’t Find a List?
If you can’t find a list of your target market then you’ll have to do lead generation to build your list. This process can be expensive and time consuming but once you have the list, its yours to keep (rather than renting lists).
Lead generation usually starts with placing advertisements in other media (i.e.
newspapers, Internet, magazines, newsletters etc.) that target the interests of your niche.
The advertisements should entice readers to call up and ask for something free (or very low cost). This allows you to get their contact information and build your list.
For example, if you were a sauna dealer targeting people with heart disease (saunas are known to improve blood flow to the heart) sufferers you might write up a news article about recent studies that have found that saunas to help reduce the risk of heart disease.
At the end of the article you might offer a free report about how saunas improve your health that the reader can get by calling a phone number. Below is an example of what that ad might look like.
To find out more about lead generation, read the chapter 22 titled, “Lead Generation:
How to Flood Your Small Business With Hot Qualified Prospects.”