Sales and marketing skills are a crucial part of domaining in general, especially if you invest in keyword/brandable domains to sell to end users. Inside those sales and marketing skills comes the ability to deal with objections and find reasons why you aren’t making as many sales as you want. My personal goal is to create an organization that collectively sells 10 million dollars a year. But we’ll leave that for another day, now getting back to the original topic, definition of your target market is key.
My definition of an end user might be different than yours, so I’ll clarify what who an end user is to me:
Mr. Enduser likes to make money, most of his/her decisions are based on how much money they can make. Mr. Enduser has worked hard to establish a business and is looking for creative ways to market it to more people. He/she has vaguely heard of SEO and websites, but has never dived into the benefits of each with anyone. Mr. Enduser has a mid-sized marketing budget that is spent on newspaper ads and random sponsorship of events, little league sports teams, and highschool yearbook pages.
I think that’s a pretty good picture of who my target end user is, yours might differ from it, I’m simply trying to bring some direction to our efforts. Now, to the questions at hand! Why is Mr. Enduser ignoring me? Why does he/she think they don’t need a lead capture system with a keyword domain that matches their business exactly?
Answer: Because he/she doesn’t need any of that to pay the bills or to make payroll. Their business is working without a keyword domain and a custom lead capture system. There is absolutely nothing that will urge Mr. Enduser to spend 60% of their marketing budget on anything other than what he/she knows produces results.
And the end user is rightly turning us down, they just don’t know what we know. Therefore the question becomes, how can we show them what we know about the importance of content, keyword domains, design, functionality, interaction, etc?
The only way to accomplish this transformation of perception is to tell stories, real stories. Once you know which industry you want to target, you need to invest in creating a real example with a real business. Even if this is your own business, you need to have something tangible to show them.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down with business owners who have been in business for 30 years and they ask, Dan, why the heck would I need a lead capture page? I’ve done 1 million dollars a year in sales every single year with…. and they tell me all their marketing techniques.
We as domain investors need to realize that we are buying empty lots in the middle of swamp land (Wikipedia) that needs to be drained, cleaned, and built upon. Which means owning a domain isn’t adding enough value to business owners, they can’t see what we see.
On another note, I just launched BestContent.com and will be posting some cool ideas on DevelopTogether.com that were shared in the chat at GoDrops.com by a few members. The idea has been in my head for about a year and I’ll need as many heads and helping hands as possible to get it off the ground.
