Every business wants lots of sales so it makes sense to try to appeal to everyone. But unfortunately, that’s not what works. You can’t make everyone happy. More often than not, when you appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. Your message gets bland and diluted.

On the other hand, when you get as specific as possible and really laser target your niche, you’re more likely to get sales. Let’s say you only get fifty visits to your site each day, but those visits are members of your tribe. They’re people to whom your message speaks directly. They’re also people you know well, so you know better how to make them offers they will like. If those fifty are people who are tuned into your message, they’re more likely to buy from you.

By the way, this doesn’t necessarily mean excluding anyone. When you zero in on a very specific niche, you’ll also get stragglers from outside it who related to your message.

Selling on an Individual Level

You can do this by taking your entire market and boiling it down to one individual. You create a profile of your target market, identifying them as if they were just one person.

Create a profile for this person that includes demographic information such as age, gender, phase in life, income bracket, job status, education level, marital status, family, and whatever else is relevant (almost everything is).

Also include psychographic information. This includes personality, attitudes, lifestyle, interests, hobbies, behaviour patterns, buying behaviour, and values. Identify them as socially conscious, conservative, worried about the environment, fun loving, cutting edge, trend following, family oriented, etc.

How to Create a Profile

There are several ways to create this profile. One is to sit down and brainstorm on each of the above characteristics. But a much more scientific way is to look at actual data and create the profile from that. You can get this data from:

– Your current customer base

– Your competitors’ customer base (a good option if you haven’t started selling)

– Your products or services.

To consider products or services, pick apart each and list its features and the benefits they offer. For each benefit, who would most enjoy it? These are characteristics of your target market.

Nichify

The idea is to take a large group of people and make it more specific. For example, take pet owners, a large and generic group, and work them down to cat owners. This is still a huge group, so how about cat owning retirees? Here’s a small group you can market to. They can become ‘your people.’ All we’ve done is zero in on a specific demographic group.

Let’s say you want to target small businesses. Make it more specific by identifying an industry – for example, the tourist industry. Narrow it even more by picking a geographic region like Arizona. If it’s still too wide a net, make it small tourism businesses in Arizona that specialize in eco-tourism.

Once you get started with your marketing campaign, keep tabs on your followers. If you find details you missed in your original profile, add them in. Or you may end up attracting a whole other demographic than you expected.

Tony

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