Cold Market Strategies for Network Marketers

The cold market for network marketing: it's always been a topic of interest, especially for people that have burned through their warm market.

Reps have already talked to all their friends and family members, and they want to find a way to scale their business even after that.

In this article, I'll be covering some of the things that I used to do even decades ago, and how that's transitioned into what I do today using modern strategies.

If you're new to this site, we help people grow their businesses globally, even on a tight budget.

So let's go ahead and get started.

The Process of Cold Marketing

First, let's talk about this process of the cold prospecting and marketing, and why I started doing it. And then I'll eventually go into strategies that you can use too.

So I started because when I first started my business, I was asked to create my prospect list, talk to my friends and family members. This list was close to 100 people. And then I was so excited about the business opportunity, I ended up calling almost all of them in a couple of days, trying to get them on three-way calls, opportunity meetings, one-on-one meetings.

Close to that time, this was actually my second opportunity. I wanted to talk to people at a family gathering. I think it was a holiday at that time.

I remember one of my relatives saying, gosh, you're involved in this stuff again. And then I realized that my relatives, were distancing themselves away from me. 

I could tell that when I just started talking to them, I think they got the idea that I was eventually going to pitch something to them. 

But in any case, if your friends or family members hear pitches from you or if you are someone who has joined multiple companies over time, then they are probably really tired or annoyed of hearing about this stuff that you're involved in. And one of the reasons why people get annoyed is because they're not part of that audience. They're not part of that right audience that you should be talking to. This can even be applied to other cases.

Learning MLM Strategies from Junk Mail

Nobody really wants to get their mailbox cluttered with a bunch of junk mail things that they don't want. And I'm sure you would agree with that. But some people fail to understand the purpose or intent that the business has when a person sends out that junk mail to you. So what I give as an example is imagine that you're going to get married. And at that point in time, you're thinking about getting your partner a ring, and then you've looked all over the place. And that ring that you're thinking about buying at a certain shop has been selling it for $10,000.

I'm sure there are other things that are more expensive than that. But let's say ten thousand dollars and then out of the blue, you get this mail from that company saying that if you use this coupon code on this day, you can save 30% off your purchase. I think you would agree that the mail that you received is beneficial - especially if you could save 30%. That's a big deal, especially for something that is so expensive.

And so thinking about that example, most of the other people that aren't planning to buy that ring, they'd probably throw that piece of mail away. But I'm sure you would keep that and make sure that you would have it at the point of purchase. So that's just an example of target market. So let's talk about cold market. Think about who your cold market is. 

I'll go into other ways of communicating with cold market soon; before getting started, you'll need to understand who is the right market for you, especially the strangers that you need to eventually discuss things with.

The Good Old Prospecting Framework

I remember when I first got started. My upline would tell me some kind of framework or some characteristics of a person that would define them as the market that I should approach:

The characteristics of great prospects:

- people that were married

- had children

- between the ages of 25 to 65+

- owned a home. 

That's what that company called a golden market.

That's what they believed in any way.

Nowadays, that's old school. It's better than targeting everyone, but you can do better.

Over the years, technology has come out that allows you to target people even further, and you can target people by those factors, plus even their interests and behaviors. So these are kind of things that you really, really need to look into, especially if you are trying to save a lot of time money, because some people will try to convince you that it's just a numbers game, that if you go through 100 people or a thousand people, you're just closer to a yes.

I've heard that so many times. But if you're talking to a bunch of homeless people, and you talk to, look, even ten thousand people, most likely you're not going to get a cell. So I just want to convince you that it really matters who you talk to. It's not just this group of people who are married, have kids and have a home and have this certain age range. They can be part of your market, but that's a very, very wide market.

You have to dive into more finite things, more detailed characteristics. I'll go over that soon.

Cold Prospecting and Marketing, the Old School Way

One of the things that I used to do in the day was I used to go to shopping malls and grocery stores. I called it "malling" back then. Eventually, that led to cold calling where I made around 200 calls a day to people in the phone book. And then eventually that went into canvassing, which was door to door.

Later, I would actually do workshops. 

Out of all these strategies, I enjoyed workshops the most.The reason is that if I went to my local library and asked them about events, if I could actually host an event, then they would be open to that. But plus they would actually do all the advertising. They actually announced my events and the community newspaper. So it's free advertising. And the good thing about that is that people that were interested in that topic, that were sharing, they would actually be part of that target audience, the right market I should be talking to.

So if I was providing a workshop, let's say in a topic like retirement planning for people who really want to retire early or learn the best ways to invest, then people that would sign up for that workshop would be part of that audience, that group of people that are interested in that topic. So I hope you can see that this is just a way of filtering through people and getting to the people that are more likely to actually be part of your target audience.

So let's go ahead and talk about how these strategies have changed over time, because nowadays, people use many other strategies. 

One of the Oldest, Yet Highly Effective Strategies to Attract New Business

One of the easiest ways to filter people is by creating content. That workshop was just the version of creating content. 

Nowadays, you have access to a lot of different platforms where you can create content. If that person eventually reads multiple blog posts about that topic, most likely, they are closer to that target audience.

And then from there, you can actually generate leads, something that I share in my course on truth, on OMG, it's a free course, by the way.

By generating leads, you can use the power of automation to start doing follow up with your cold market. So far I've discussed old and modern strategies. There was even a time when I was using 1-800 toll-free numbers. Yeah, it was a traditional strategy where I placed classified ads, and then interested prospects would request a free report. From there, I would send them something via mail.

I would only recommend this strategy if you have a high budget for advertising. If you have a premium offer, it will be easier to pay for ads compared to offering something worth a couple bucks in commissions. When I used this strategy, I was earning around $2K in profit for each sale. It was very profitable, so it was worth my time and energy. 

If you aren't making a lot per a sale, there are free strategies out there where you can communicate across different mediums, even on a tight budget.

Using Social Media to Make Cold Market Sales

It's very tough if you're just posting to all your friends on Facebook or any other social media platform. I'll just say that it's something that some people have said works like gangbusters, but I've tried it in different ways, 

I actually have a number of Facebook groups under aliases. Those groups have thousands of people and doing it that way, if it's just a bunch of people that are seeking just freebies, and they're not really in it for a commercial intent, then it's very hard just to keep on posting like that to generate income.

There are ways to do it, but for the most part, just posting commercial information to your friends and family on social media will not work so well. To use social media, you'll need a lot of value-focused content to create sales opportunities.

So far, we've talked about content marketing. That's something that I talk about a lot of my site. This is probably the easiest way you can attract the cold market.

I can create a piece of content, and it will increase the chances of being found globally. Here's an example. Several years ago, I posted a video on YouTube, and it attracted over 1 million views from people around the world. It was a very short video - less than a minute long, That's something that is not easy to do. If I compare it to blabbing my mouth to a million people offline, I'd rather take the video approach.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Even in larger conferences, it's not that easy to have an audience of a million people.

With places like YouTube and TikTok, and MLM blogging, you can create opportunities and attract people to your business. 

Cold Marketing Compliance

The last bit of information I'll share is about compliance.

There are a lot of companies that say that all these things have to go through compliance, and that you have to submit your ideas or material for manual approval. 

I spent nearly half a year to get my exclusive recruiting system approved. If you're trying to create some content for promotional purposes and getting it approved by the company, to me, it's a waste of time. Of course, they're trying to do it for legal purposes, and they want to make sure that you don't get them in trouble.

That's mostly for their benefit. If you are trying to communicate with the cold market to build up your reputation, your trust, there's nothing wrong about selling yourself. 

So just keep in mind that promoting yourself is not something that those companies can regulate. 

They can regulate the products that you are promoting online. That's something that they can tell you not to do because those are their products. It's under their name, their brand.

However, if you promote your brand and create your personal brand, you can actually do what you want to do because you are selling yourself. 

Hopefully that all makes sense. 

It's just the way to do networking, build the relationship over time, and then generate leads through cold marketing. From there, you can use technology to scale your business globally. That's something that's very cool nowadays. It's very easy and affordable to create content that can be scaled worldwide.