Are You Trying To Reach Too Many Customers?
There is a very important marketing principle – “Sell to everyone and you sell to no-one.”
What this means is that if you try to appeal too broadly to all types of customers, the customers who you really want, those who actually need your specific product, get lost in the noise.
Imagine if you are in the market for a product, let’s say you are a lawyer trying to find a software app to organise who works on what cases. If I wrote you a marketing email that said I had a project management app, would you be interested? What if I wrote to you and said that I had an app specially designed for lawyers and it matched the milestones for each case to specific lawyers? Which of those two letters would you follow up first?
What this marketing principle means is that you must get to know your exact target market, and your marketing tools, from website to language to logo must be measured by that specific target market. Will the corporate colours appeal to the target market? Is your messaging specific to their needs and problems?
But sometimes that market is so crowded that it is difficult to define your differentiation. The legal space is like this. So might the accounting industry or even car repair workshops. How do you drill down so that you suit a specific target market when everyone else is gunning for that market?
You have to really dive deep to find a market niche that you can call your own. So a legal firm, instead of being an “all-service” firm, can specialise in one part of the space such as Family Law or land development. Accountants can target businesses of a specific size, say 20-30 staff and be turning over $10 million to $20 million because businesses that size requires certain specific services or face a specific set of problems that the accounting firm can specialise in. The car repair workshop can niche into a particular make or model, or even in a particular problem like brakes and hydraulics.
Even when a small market is crowded, you need to think about niching down and being very precise about the slice of the market that you can make your own.
Watch this video where I discuss how you do this.
So, to review, here are the 6 steps again:
- Establish some goals
- Decide what to offer that will achieve those goals
- Decide on your target market
- Then niche down on that market and create products and systems around that niche
- Be active where your target niche are active
- Meet your customers and stay in touch
Here are some other ways you can niche your target market:
- Geographically – for example specialising in one area
- By engagement – say, exclusively online
- By problem – choose a particular problem that your target market faces
- By age – perhaps people over 60 need specific services from your industry
One other thing to be aware of is not to succumb to “FOMO.”
No, that’s not a rude word – it stands for “Fear Of Missing Out.” It is a natural fear that if you focus on a very narrow niche, you might miss out. After all, a sale is a sale, right?
The answer is not always “yes.” Marketing is an intensive, everyday activity. What you must achieve is the best return on investment of your time and money. If you fired a scattergun, you will hit one or two targets. But if you aimed very carefully, you should hit almost everything you aim at. So, don’t be afraid of missing out, you are in fact attracting more of those customers you really want to serve. And, if you do this well, those markets adjacent to your niche will also be attracted by your activity – you won’t miss out, trust me.
Of course, once you have a specific target market, you will need to construct a marketing plan to specifically target that market with your marketing strategies. Click here to learn more about our 7-Step Marketing Plan process called SMART Marketing.
You can also go to our website and check out the free resources and giveaways in the blogs and free resources sections to help you in your marketing efforts. Don’t forget to sign up to receive our valuable free business strategies sent directly to you every week – provide leadership, create strategy, and grow your business with Teik Oh Dot Com.
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