Attraction Marketing Done Right – Part 3

Traditional businesses rely on marketing to drive their sales. They have to. The business model in which they participate is structured that way. Create a product, put it on the shelves, mass market it and hope and pray that consumers buy it. The larger an audience a company can reach through its advertising, the higher their sales.

It's a business model with which we are all familiar because it's one that we've all grown up with. Plus, for most, the large majority of the products we purchase are marketed in this fashion.

In Network Marketing, the business model is modified in that the marketing is done person to person by a team of independent distributors who earn income only when product is purchased by the end consumer. The law of averages dictates then that the more people a network marketer exposes to their product or opportunity, the higher the sales or number of conversions. More people seeing your business equals more people joining.

At face value, this quantitative look at the two varying business models might lead one to believe that the marketing for each has the same purpose – to generate more sales. But upon closer inspection, we see that this isn’t entirely accurate.

In traditional business, without a doubt the immediate aim of marketing is sales and profit. In Network Marketing however, sales and profit are not so much the aim of marketing but more or less are the byproduct of it. Since business in Network Marketing is done person to person, the purpose then for marketing is to create and build a list of people with which you can develop a rapport. The sales and profit come then once you’ve built a relationship of trust and respect with the people you’ve connected with through your marketing.

Over the years, in an effort to find more efficient methods of marketing, Network Marketers have turned to some very creative ways of meeting and connecting with larger audiences. The strategies have gradually moved away from the more personal methods like friend to friend referrals and have gravitated towards much less personal methods like advertising. In essence what we’re seeing is that Network Marketers are individually starting to behave more and more like corporations than independent distributors. And the rate of this shift has been greatly accelerated with the advent of the internet. The more we market on the internet, the further away we seem to get from and lose touch with the very foundations of what makes this business model work so well – RELATIONSHIPS.

Now this isn’t intended to be an indictment on Network Marketers taking their business online. As I’ve stated many times in the past, Attraction Marketing is a highly effective way of building your business. But without proper guidance and education, Network Marketers mislead themselves into thinking that merely having a presence on the internet is the end all and be all answer to their recruiting woes.

And when they place all their efforts and focus on creating capture pages, blogs, videos, articles, and advertisements and then still don’t see an increase in actual recruitment, they are left with an even deeper sense of frustration than they had before they began marketing online.

So, while the internet can be a powerful tool in bringing more prospects to your business, remember that it’s only part of the equation. As Network Marketers, we must remember that it’s the strength of the relationships we build that inevitably determines our success in this business. And if we lack these skills, we must certainly put at least equal effort in developing them as we do learning how to market.




In the next article, we will discuss the how far off course we’ve gotten with the bevy of new marketing systems being created every day. Also, we’re going to talk about the allure of the high-profile celebrity company endorsement and the inherent pitfalls of aligning with them.