Talking to the Minority
Marketing is broken. Cold calling and spamming are currently destroying marketing. You’re just using the most glamorous and lavish agencies, designing and using every marketing communication possible to reach a wider audience. Throwing a bunch of stones expecting it to hit somewhere will increase your costs, your assets needed, and your efforts all for some “maybes”. Simply put, you can’t be all things to all people. Nowadays, Companies are just trying to reach every Tom Dick and Harry. Let’s call the target market Dick. Focus your limited attention on your Dick. Let me elaborate why focusing on your Dick can be valuable.
Let’s look at Amazon. Now they cater everything to everyone. But are you there yet? It took Amazon 27 years to become who they are. At start they were just selling books for nerds. They knew their Dick better when they were where you are now. They erected only as their business grew. So, choose only to “Talk to The Minority”.
Defining and selecting your target audience, smoothens the communication between you and your Dick, which can be established on a true and thorough communication. As you understand your Dick better, the messages and feedbacks, are more relevant when reaching the right audience. In other words, you will be able to go much deeper with your Dick. Because if you type one message to a broad range of people, they might ignore because it does not apply to them.
One of the key things that you must ask yourself before starting a business, or when deciding to implement new strategies are; what is your target market? It only takes a few steps to identify your target market to position yourself, but it will make a massive impact.
You can begin by doing a Context analysis. This involves you to understand your company’s position, capabilities, objectives, constraints and the competitive landscape. Tools like a simple SWOT analysis, Porter’s generic strategies, A strategy Canvas, or even a value proposition canvas will take you a long way when identifying your company’s current stance. You know, to understand what you’re giving your Dick.
Next step is to do a customer profiling and select the market segment accordingly. It is important to identify Geographic, Demographic, Psychographic and Behavioural aspects of all segmented markets. Once the general public has been clustered in to different segments, a segment ranking will help decide which is more relevant to the company. Now, the company can concentrate on offering the ideal product to a specific target market or a niche market without spreading the resources too thinly. This is where you identify your Dick.
The tiring exertion will come thereafter, “How do I reach the identified minority?”. Identifying how to reach to reach your Dick is one of the most important steps that you have to take.
The segmentation results will help you with this, where do they spend most of the time? Advertise there. Be it digitally or physically. Be there. Be only there. Identify your customer journey and touch points. It will help you decide when to reach out to your Dick and how to.
Your customers might need a bit of convincing. Find a way to build a relationship to make the customer do what you want them to do. One of the most important tools you need to use while reaching your target audience is behavioural nudging. Make sure you know what you want to solve and what not to solve. Let me explain some examples, in early 1990s at an Airport in Amsterdam, a fly was printed and pasted on the men’s urinals and it improved the accuracy avoiding spillage.
Another fun example was when London wanted to reduce litter on the streets of London. The cities had a voting ashtray to prompt football fans to “Vote with their Butts”.
In marketing, please don’t shoot for the moon thinking you’ll land on the stars. There’s a higher chance you’ll be shooting in to blank space. Be focused and more effective in your strategies. You will be able to get a greater ROI. Basically, think only about what your Dick wants.
Written by Miralan Vilvaraja, Chief Commercial Officer for FUDGE™
