The simple brilliance of conquering one market at a time.
A few days ago, I talked about a simple approach to marketing success that encompasses basically these three steps: 1) identify your potential target markets, 2) pick the best one, and 3) stick with it. I am borrowing from Mark Joyner’s Simple-ology method of achieving personal success. (More about that here.) I looked at the importance of segmenting your target markets in the last post, and now I want to talk about the second step:
Pick your best market and focus on it.
Every successful entrepreneur knows (or will learn) that you can’t do everything. A very fine management consultant once told me “companies don’t fail from lack of ideas and opportunities; they fail because they don’t ignore the weaker ones.”
Put another way, if you pick your optimal target market and focus solely on it – at least until you get it off the ground – you’ll get results much faster than if you try to hit multiple targets at the same time. And, as an added bonus, you’ll know you’re hitting your best market because you picked it!
How do you pick your best market? Here’s a 3-step process that does the job well:
1.Brainstorm a list of all possible target markets. As I mentioned before, target markets are often defined by industry, job responsibility, geography, revenue, or number of employees.
2.Define the criteria you’ll use to rate and compare each market’s potential. For example, these criteria might include: size of the market, number of competitors, barriers to and cost of entry, your level of expertise within the market, and so on.
3.Compare the markets based on these criteria to find the one that offers you the opportunity to sell the largest quantity of your product or service at the highest price with the lowest cost.
Now, focus your resources on getting your fair share of this market, and stay focused on it until your program is solid enough that you can put some attention elsewhere without experiencing a drop in results. Then you can move on to your #2 market opportunity. It’s that simple.
Technorati Tags: marketing, marketing system, target market, b2b marketing, strategic marketing, susan tatum, tatum marketing
This article was first published May 2, 2007 on the Tatum Marketing blog
A few days ago, I talked about a simple approach to marketing success that encompasses basically these three steps: 1) identify your potential target markets, 2) pick the best one, and 3) stick with it. I am borrowing from Mark Joyner’s Simple-ology method of achieving personal success. (More about that here.) I looked at the importance of segmenting your target markets in the last post, and now I want to talk about the second step:
Pick your best market and focus on it.
Every successful entrepreneur knows (or will learn) that you can’t do everything. A very fine management consultant once told me “companies don’t fail from lack of ideas and opportunities; they fail because they don’t ignore the weaker ones.”
Put another way, if you pick your optimal target market and focus solely on it – at least until you get it off the ground – you’ll get results much faster than if you try to hit multiple targets at the same time. And, as an added bonus, you’ll know you’re hitting your best market because you picked it!
How do you pick your best market? Here’s a 3-step process that does the job well:
- Brainstorm a list of all possible target markets. As I mentioned before, target markets are often defined by industry, job responsibility, geography, revenue, or number of employees.
- Define the criteria you’ll use to rate and compare each market’s potential. For example, these criteria might include: size of the market, number of competitors, barriers to and cost of entry, your level of expertise within the market, and so on.
- Compare the markets based on these criteria to find the one that offers you the opportunity to sell the largest quantity of your product or service at the highest price with the lowest cost.
Now, focus your resources on getting your fair share of this market, and stay focused on it until your program is solid enough that you can put some attention elsewhere without experiencing a drop in results. Then you can move on to your #2 market opportunity. It’s that simple.
Wed, Nov 4, 2009
Conversion Rates, Strategy, Traffic
Written by: Susan Tatum