Archive | January, 2019

In marketing, your target market must be small enough that the resources you’re able to commit will have a big impact.

Imagine carrying the heaviest rock you can hold and dropping it into a small pond. The splash would be huge, loud and noticed by anyone around, and the ripples would cover the entire surface.

Now imagine dropping that same rock into the middle of the ocean. No one would even notice. Imagine dropping a rock 100 times that size in the middle of the ocean. Again, no one would notice a thing.

The rock, of course, is your resources.

When new marketers come to me looking for advice, I ask them who their target market is. Nine times out of ten, it’s, “Everyone who wants to ___.”

It might be everyone who needs to lose weight, make money or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Their market is too big and they’ll never get noticed.

But if they target teachers who want to make extra money online, or nurses, or fast food workers, they’ll probably make a killing.

Still not convinced? Think of the pond versus the ocean, and the rock as being your marketing. How much marketing will you have to do to get noticed in the ocean? You’ll need the resources of a Coca-Cola to do it.

Now imagine getting noticed in the pond. Heck, if you just stand up and say, “I’ll teach everyone in the pond how to lose 10 pounds this month, or how to make $1,000 a month online,” you’ll get noticed right away.

When someone describes their market too broadly, I know they’re going to fail. But when they know exactly who their audience is and how they’re going to reach them, I know they’ll do fine.

Gary Halbert once said at a seminar, “If I offer to set you up in the fast food business with a hamburger joint, and you can have any one special advantage you want, what will it be? A clown? Special sauce? Great burgers? A big ad budget?”

This is the point where the audience was shouting out their answers. I don’t know if anyone got the answer right, though.

Did you? What special advantage would you want?

Gary’s answer was, “A starving crowd.”

If the people are starving, and you’re there with burgers, do you really need any of those other things?

Look at a roach coach – those food wagons that come around to factory parking lots, special events and so forth. Their food is often bad, overpriced and unhealthy. Yet they get swarms of eager customers. Why? Because they go where the starving crowds are.

What is a “starving crowd?”

It might be people with a pressing problem, like a certain health crisis or being overweight.

It could be a market in the midst of change and upheaval, with people looking for answers and help. Health care and insurance in the U.S. might fit this category, since the rules keep changing.

It could be a market in pain, like retail stores trying to survive against internet shopping.

It could simply be people who are hyper-passionate about their particular interest, such as horses, or golf, or investing.

Ideally, you want either one of these starving crowds:

1. A group of buyers with an aggravation that gives them sleepless nights, anxiety, ulcers, rage and so forth, where you can solve their problem or provide something to help. For example, tax problems, health problems, childcare problems and so forth.

2. Or a burning desire for something you can provide. For example, a way to make money, better a golf score, achieve a high mark on an entrance exam, etc.

The two categories can, of course, overlap, which is even better. Worrying about bills or hating a job overlaps with making money from the internet.

Your goal as a marketer is to identify one of these markets and build the right offer for what that market wants right NOW, versus developing an offer and then figuring out who might want to buy it from you.

Yes, I know you might have heard a version of this before, but it’s so crucial to your success, that it bears repeating time and time again.

Choose your market, find out what they want to buy today, and offer them exactly that. When you do, your marketing is already halfway done.

It’s all about fancy copywriting and Jedi mind tricks to make the sale with your copy, right? After all, that’s what most copywriters will tell you.

However, at least half the battle is won via selection of your audience, rather than how good your message, your copy or your offer is.

If you’ve got mediocre marketing aimed at a highly targeted and well selected audience, you’ll get great results.

But if you’ve got exceptional, world-class, you-hired-the-best-of-the-best copywriter kind of marketing aimed at the wrong market or even a poorly targeted market, at the very best you’ll get mediocre results.

And odds are, you won’t even do that well.

You need to know who your customers are and where to find them. Who is your ideal client? What do they want, what do they need, what are their objections, and what do they look for in your product or service?

Here’s an easy example – not all targeting is this simple, but it gives you the idea:

You have a pet-related product and so you target all pet owners. That is sloppy targeting, and yet I see it daily.

Or, you have a cat product for senior cats who have chronic kidney disease.

Now you know exactly who your market is – no, it’s not cats with kidney disease, it’s their humans. Talk to them, find out their struggles, fears, worries, problems and so forth with dealing with this disease.

Ask them why they try so hard to keep their kitties healthy rather than go get a new, younger cat (if you’ve ever loved a pet, you already know the answer to that one.)

When you have a product that can help these particular cat owners, you can have a sloppy marketing campaign and it won’t matter a bit – they will buy if your product helps solve their real problem, I guarantee it.

Spend half your marketing time finding out exactly who your market is and targeting those people. Spend the other half crafting your marketing message, and you will have a marketing campaign that meets the mark.