Before sharing how to figure out your audience, let me begin with the bulletproof way to NEVER find your tribe:
Avoid imminent failure by targeting the largest market of buyers.
Our rational brains trick us into believing this is the safest bet. We think marketing is like fishing, throwing the biggest net in the water. But unfortunately, we fail to realize that fishing and marketing are nothing alike.
Why does this approach fail?
- We prioritize short-term profit over long-term learnings that will help our business grow into the future
- We gain little understanding as to why the RIGHT customer is picking our product because we have too many WRONG customers
- We never get any traction in specific customer segments resulting in little momentum and customer evangelism
So, what should we do instead?
Pick the smallest customer segment and thoroughly test their “appetite.”
This will result in more frequent failures but eliminates segments that don’t have an appetite for your product or vision.
The more bets you make (and fail) with your target audience, the better informed you will be to make the right bet in the future.
Once you find one segment that eats up your offering, continue betting on new segments until you build an adequately segmented audience.
This is called the D-Day approach. You can’t win the war until you win the war on the beaches of Normandy.
The bet is which beachfront (customer segment) to attack.
Winning the war is conquering one customer segment after another.
You can’t fast forward to winning the war.
You must find the first segment you can win and then build from there.
🧠 + ❤️ // JO