Attract: Marketing

If you build a great product in the proverbial forest and no one is there to buy it, does it make a sound? It does. And it sounds like the click of trying to start a car without any fuel in it.

You certainly need to have a strong value proposition to have a sustainable and scalable growth system, and the better the value proposition, the more speed you’re going to be able to create. But a strong value proposition is not enough to build a strong business. The business graveyard contains the caskets of many great products and services!

While the value proposition represents the capacity of your engine, the marketing system you have in place reflects gas fueling the potential power.

If prospective customers don’t know who you are or what you do, it’s difficult for them to give you their money. You have to FIRST create awareness of your product or service with prospective customers and THEN attract them to your business if you want a chance at selling them. But if this were easy, you’d already have a surplus of customers lining up to give you their money.

What’s more, merely attracting customers is not enough to create lasting growth. If you want to create sustainable and scalable growth, you have to have a measurable and repeatable approach to attracting customers.

So how exactly do you go about developing that approach?

First and foremost, you have to truly understand who you are trying to attract and define that target audience in as much detail as possible. Once this audience is qualitatively assessed (Who are they? Why would they want your product?) and quantitatively measured (How many of them are there? Where can they be found?), you can develop a data-backed strategy to make them aware of your business, your brand, and your value proposition.

I’ve had clients tell me they’ve done this research, and then say their target audience is “small business owners” or “women.” These kinds of broad categories are a good start, but we need to further refine them. After all, small business owners are as diverse as the population at large. And despite the tendency of some marketers to lazily market to women with a pink-it-and-shrink-it approach, women (this should go without saying) are a diverse demographic.

To focus your audience, consider using an exercise my college English teacher introduced me to. He had us write a paper and turn it in. Then he had us take that same paper and cut the number of words in half and turn it in, and then we repeated the exercise one more time.

Our essays, of course, became tighter and sharper with every round of edits.

The same approach works in defining your target audience. For example, rather than trying to reach “small businesses,” consider segmenting based on questions like these:

• Do you serve small businesses with $100K per year in sales or $75 million? Is there a minimum threshold or a maximum? What is

your sweet spot?

• Do you serve small businesses that are starting up, growing, mature, or in need of a turnaround?

• Do you serve small businesses in a particular industry?

• Do you serve small businesses that have an online presence, brickand-mortar location, both, or neither?

• Do you serve small businesses with local and regional focus, a national focus, an international emphasis?

Answering all of these questions would get you closer to a truly target-sized audience—but I bet you could cut that audience in half to refine it further. And when you’ve done all that, ask yourself why do you serve those markets and not others?

See, the process isn’t easy! But the effort you put into marketing strategically now will pay off when you’re selling efficiently later.

Alas, many clients I work with are (understandably) reluctant to scale back the size of their target audiences. What if one of those audiences represents even a few sales?

As an entrepreneur myself, I know this feeling all too well. Rest assured, you are not ignoring other audiences … forever. You are just focusing your immediate attention (a limited resource) on your initial and thus most valuable audiences. (Geoffrey A. Moore’s classic book Crossing the Chasm, explains this concept in much more detail and is honestly one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read.)

Almost all broadly defined audiences have dozens of characteristics that make them very different from one another. What you are trying to do is hone in on those differences and make it easier to figure out how to reach these audiences and what to say to create interest (i.e., attraction).

For example, if you are targeting all small businesses, that means you are targeting Etsy shop owners AND third-generation family farmers. Even if you offer a product or service that appeals to both of these groups, you would ideally try to reach them through different

channels with customized messaging that speaks to their unique motivations for buying.

Now, can you have more than one audience? Absolutely. If you are going to grow substantially over time, chances are you’ll need more than one very narrow audience to get there. But these different audiences are still generally defined and segmented based on their personalities, or personas, with different campaigns targeting each persona through unique messaging. Doing this allows you to optimize your marketing budget.

A word of caution here: don’t bite off more than you can chew. Unless you have infinite resources, you should stick to one or two target audiences in your initial strategy and bring others into the fold later.

Treat winning an audience like a race team would treat winning a highly competitive race. You need to analyze the intricacies associated with that track (or audience), and build a machine optimized to win the race (or your audience’s business). Once you win one race, you’ll be in a better position to win others with additional customized

cars.

Narrowing down your audiences will help you optimize your marketing strategy, including channels, messaging, and budget, which couldn’t possibly all be covered in this ebook. When done well, though, this process will lead to audiences making their way to your business as leads. Now, how best to convert them into customers?