Your Target Audience is NOT Everyone

It’s amazing how many times I hear this from business owners as I sit down with them to discuss the copy that they need for their website or landing page. They say things like this when I ask who their target audience is:

“We work with everyone.” 

“We can customize a solution for anybody.”

“Everyone can use our product.”

These sentiments may be true – to an extent, but that still doesn’t mean that your target audience is everyone. I know that at first it seems counterintuitive to purposely restrict your market. After all, once you start limiting your audience to be only a specific kind of person, aren’t you ignoring an entire segment of the population that could be giving you money?

Even if you think that your product can be and is being used by people of all walks of life, it is still highly doubtful that “everyone” is your target audience. Let me explain why not.

Some things that happen when you purposely decide to highlight your target audience with a broad brushstroke are as follows.

Your message gets blurry

Picture you had to choose the restaurant for a night out with some of your spouse’s friends and their significant others, but you really didn’t know much about them. It would be awfully difficult to choose the right place. To choose a restaurant with any success, you’d need to narrow in on who these people are. After all if most of them are earthy, crunchy, vegans with gluten allergies, it’s not going to go over well if you take them to a BBQ joint. If the group included professionals with lucrative salaries and expensive taste, they wouldn’t love dining at an average burger chain when they were hoping for exotic martins, craft beers and trendy fusion dishes. Even with just a little information, you’d stand a better chance of choosing a restaurant that everyone would enjoy.

The same is true for your target audience. When you have to talk to an amorphous group of unknown people, there is very little you can say that would be compelling to all of them. After all, they are each so different. They have different pains, different concerns, different values, different ways of seeing the world, and most importantly different ways of shopping. So to assume that your product is for everyone and that you will market to everyone so that you leave no sale on the table is a faulty and reckless decision.

If you understand the exact person you’re talking to, and can speak to what’s going on in their life right now, you can then position yourself as the solution to these issues. When you can speak directly to that one person, you will come out leagues ahead of the businesses that try to capitalize on everyone. Your message will be crystal clear, super specific and laser-focused. There will be no question to that person that you have what they need, and the sale will be that much more likely to happen.

You have to offer so many options

Another problem that you run into when you market your product or service to everyone is that you have to offer a wide array of options. You haven’t narrowed your focus, so you don’t really know what your audience responds too. You need to have pricing options that are inexpensive, average, and higher end. You have to offer payment plans and full payments options. You have to offer free shipping, promo codes, paper coupons, Groupons, loyalty cards etc. You have to show up on every social media channel and every conventional marketing channel – like tv and radio  in order to reach every possible ear.

If you could narrow down exactly who your ideal customer is, you wouldn’t have to spread yourself so thin. For example if you knew that your target customers were male millennials with limited funds, you wouldn’t need to waste resources crafting discounts for paying in full. Your target audience isn’t sitting on a pile of money in a savings account for exactly those situations. They are probably stretching every paycheck as far as it will go and probably living with their parents still. You’d need affordable options that provided value, and you’d be able to get away with marketing only on social media. There would be no need to waste time advertising on television, especially understanding that most millennials stream their digital content. Essentially, you’d be able to specialize your offering to talk to this specific group and you could bypass everything else.

In other words, you force yourself  to cover all the bases when you don’t have a specific focus. You have to actually work out ways to be everything to everyone. Millennials might do well with customer service where you can chat online with a representative, but if you’re ideal clients are retired baby boomers, they are going to want to talk on the phone. Without your focus, you’re going to have to offer both options, which takes a lot more resources than offering just what’s needed. Why not decide on your ideal customer and make their life amazing when they work with you rather than giving mediocre service to everyone.

You can’t excel

This brings me to my next point. Without laser focusing on a specific target audience, you are preventing yourself from excelling in your chosen industry. No company can be everything to everyone. There are too many different people with different values and needs in this world. It’s literally impossible. But when you focus on a particular client and talk directly to them, build your policies around their specific needs and goals, and continue to implement new products and services that are solutions to their unique problems, you are becoming vital to that particular customer.

Think of all the products or companies in the world that exist that you have absolutely no use for. If you aren’t a snowboarder, you might never have cause to purchase anything from Burton, and no amount of marketing can ever turn you into a customer. You simply don’t need what they sell. That doesn’t mean that their business is doomed if they can’t convert you. It simply means that you’re not part of their target audience. Those that are part of the target audience are happy to hear from Burton through email, and when Burton has a product that solves a problem a snowboarder has, they will be likely to purchase it. Burton can excel in snowboarding gear, but they wouldn’t be able to do this if they assumed that everyone could be a customer. After all, you don’t have to snowboard to wear their winter jacket. Everyone could benefit from a winter jacket. That might be true, but if you’re not a snowboarder, it’s unlikely that you want to look like a snowboarder. Sure you are a “possible” customer, but you are not the “ideal” customer. There are plenty of other jacket manufacturers that can speak to a totally different set of winter jacket needs, and for one of those companies that person might be the “ideal” customer.

Marketing Becomes Too Costly

So in taking our snowboarding example from above, you theoretically COULD market your snowboarding jackets to everyone if you were Burton, but it would become very costly very quickly. If your target customer isn’t defined, then you really can’t say where it is they hang out or where you should show up if you want their attention. Are they online? How old are they? What’s their gender? What do they like to do? Where do they get their information? Their entertainment? What’s important to them?

So if you don’t know anything about them, than how do you go about marketing to them? You would have to do literally any and every type of marketing that’s available if you really want to saturate the market with your message. If someone comes up to you and says, you should advertise on the ferry that transports travelers from point A to B. They are sitting in their chairs for a two hour ride and have nothing to look at but the wall where your ad could be. If you don’t understand your ideal customer, how would you even know if this is a smart marketing investment for you product or service?

The truth is, you wouldn’t. But assuming that it would simply mean more possible eyes on your product, you’d have to spend the money on it because everyone is a possible customer. Right??

Wrong. The truth is that you can make a healthy, even considerable or massive income by ONLY marketing to your target audience. And when you do this, your marketing dollars have a stronger ROI because your prospects are qualified leads.

You Risk Appealing to No One

The other risk you run when you try to be everything to everyone is that you end up appealing to no one. When you have to universalize your offerings so that they appeal to a wide audience, you end up losing what it is that sets you apart from your competition. This means your product is the ultimate vanilla. There is nothing that makes it essential to anyone and sooner or later if will fall off everyone’s radar, if it even registers in the first place.

Specificity Works

Even if you do have a product that everyone needs, it’s likely that you have different versions of your product that are geared for different markets. You don’t have to give up on marketing to everyone, but you do need to understand that you need separate, specific marketing dedicated to each product. For example, say you sell toothbrushes. Ok, everyone needs a toothbrush, but you’re going to have different toothbrushes for people with sensitive gums and teeth, different toothbrushes for kids and maybe even electric toothbrushes for the tech-savvy. All of those products require marketing aimed at a very specific person.

It’s prudent to create marketing avatars or personas to help with your advertising. It’s challenging to come up with a the verbiage aimed at talking to a female over 50, but it becomes easier when you can actually give that persona a name, a job, interests, a family, hobbies etc. Once you have a picture of the person you’re talking to, the copy comes naturally. Now it’s like you’re writing a letter to your Aunt Linda. You know exactly what she’s going through, what objections she would raise, and how to overcome those objections. Your marketing is personalized, and it will be more successful because of it.

Ok, well then I guess I just don’t know who my target audience is.

Sometimes, it can be hard to determine who the target audience is for a particular product OR maybe after a certain amount of time in your industry, you discover that your ideal client isn’t who you thought it was. That’s fine. There are a couple of ways you can figure out who you should be targeting.

You can look to your past clients. Which clients are the ones who were the easiest sales? Who are the one who came to you for their need and then kept coming back with hardly any coaxing. The reason they didn’t require much advertising in the first place was because your product or service was such a great fit for them. Once they knew about your company, they became lifelong customers. Well, what is it about them that makes them such a perfect fit? What do these people have in common? Could this be your target audience?

Another metric you can look at is who you’ve enjoyed working with the most over the years. Chances are, the reason that you enjoyed this experience so much was because you didn’t have to convince them of much. Their needs naturally intersected with what you offered and how you offered it. The experience was seamless because it was a natural fit. How can you find more of these people? What qualities do these customers share?

There is one additional thing to consider as you’re thinking about your target audience. Is your product user the same as your product buyer? For example, if you run a chain of assisted living facilities, your product users are senior citizens, but that doesn’t mean that your product buyers are senior citizens. It might be that your buyers are the middle-aged children of senior citizens looking for the next option for aging parents. Understanding this differentiation is important in your marketing efforts.

This same situation will come up often with products for kids. Yes, you need to appeal to the kids, but the parents are the ultimate purchasers when it comes to kids cereals and toys, as an example, so your marketing efforts need to take this into consideration.

Ultimately, the most important thing to understand is that a specific target audience is extremely important when it comes to creating everything from your website to your landing pages, to your automated emails. If you don’t have a comprehensive grasp of exactly whom you’re talking to, the audience is not going to pay attention.

It’s true that attention spans are short these days, but if you talk to people about what interests them, you’ll hold their attention for as long as you have something relevant to say. But if you address people as if they’re just a nameless face in an amorphous crowd, they will tune you out.

Have you struggled with finding your target audience? Let me know what you think in the comments below.