Day 8 – WorkStep Three: Location, Location, Location

It’s 9pm in Japan and I usually never write my blog at night – so this is a new experiment for me. I taught a ThinkingBody course this morning, wrote a marketing email for our Golden Week residential, then took a 2 hour meeting with Editors from a large publishing house in Japan about an idea for publishing a new book – one we created together based on market appeal.

And I spent time this morning looking up the Yoga schools, top Gyms and Pilates studios in LA to see where they are situated. Studio City or Hollywood are two locales for many of them -  this fits with Brett’s local instincts, so it looks like BodyChance will be in that area.

There is another aspect to “location” which is about the habits of your niche. Where do these people hang out? How can you reach them? For BodyChance in LA we will mount a long term media campaign. We did that in Tokyo, it took several years, but eventually we were getting articles in premier magazines every month – some of them national icons available in convenience stores across of Japan.

I want to describe this to show how hard it is to make Alexander Technique your niche, because it is necessary to invent it as a niche! So first we decided our primary demographic: woman 25~40, single, working, many still living with parents, having spare money to spend on their own personal needs. Next we visited all the news stands around the area of our studio, and purchased every single magazine that seemed targeted to these woman.

We ended up with a stack of over 50 different titles. Next we wrote off to the advertising department of them all and requested a breakdown of their readership: they freely give you number of sales, number of readers, age range, interests, hobbies, average income, location spread, gender – a rich, data set that helped us assess if this was our target audience. Oh yes, and we read through the kind of articles they were publishing.

We narrowed the 50 magazines down to 20 contenders, then prepared an information pack about BodyChance, Alexander Technique, and sample articles we could offer them. We then posted that to them and followed it up with a call, or in some cases actually going to reception and asking to see the Editor.

What’s the problem every Editor has? Finding good content. When they trust you, and like your content, you start getting articles published. Our articles attracted people to our studio, and increased our credibility when we tackled the big national titles. They do watch each other.

You don’t want to have to do all that. With a niche it is simple. You need to offer problem-solving content, but as you understand their problems, you understand how to create great content. What other locations are you going to find your niche audience situated? Be a speaker at their next event? Publish a book for them? Get your blog going. It’s up to you.

TOMORROW: WorkStep 4 – What Is Your Service About And How Will You Package It?

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