Home Based Guerrila Marketing

Your home based business is not just a small version of a big marketing conglomerate. You are faced with totally different issues, problems, and opportunities requiring specific skills and tactics.

Like it or not, your business will be pigeonholed. You may be pigeonholed as unreliable, expensive, or if you take control of the situation, the best home business in your field. It's up to you.  

As a home-based businessperson, you need to use pigeonholing to your advantage by creating your very own position within your industry of choice. Then your position is the segment of the market that you choose based on your strength and the competition's weakness. It's where you fit.

There are two unassailable facts that force every guerrilla to adopt a position before someone does it for him: 1. The marketplace is cluttered with competition. 2. For your home-based business to succeed, you need to cut through the clutter.

The cluttered marketplace is a fact. An overwhelming number of products, services and messages reach the consumer every day....

Clearly, as a home-based business, you have to cut through this clutter. You must set yourself apart, and you can't do it by outspending Procter & Gamble. And you can't do it by hoping that consumers will make the effort to discover you.

Many people persist in believing that their business will be treated differently by the jaded market. They care far more about their business than anyone else, and they believe that consumers will make the effort to discover them.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that your potential customers know or care about your business as much as you do.

The Art of Positioning

Be First. If you're the first in a category, you can usually invent your own position. ....A caveat to that is:

1. Just because you're first in a position doesn't mean you get to stay there forever.

2. It doesn't matter who is technically first in the marketplace with a product or service. The first to get a product or service into the consumer's mind owns the position.

You don't have to be a member of the Fortune 500 to be first. Home-based guerrillas can be the first in several ways. You can be the first to offer a product or service in your community. You can be the first to tailor a general-use item for a specific audience. You can be the first to market a product at a new price point. You can be the first to offer an alternative to an existing product or service. You can be the first to tap into a soon-to-be major market that larger companies have overlooked.

Opportunities to combine marketing elements into a propiertary niche are virtually endless, especially for guerrillas, who don't have the entire world as a customer.

Seth Godin-Editor of eMarketing