Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

About a year and a half ago (in April 2007) I wrote an article called “Having trouble reaching your marketing objectives? Borrow from the “Simple-ology” Approach”. I’d been experimenting with an online productivity tool called Simple-ology. Its basic premise is that in order to become more successful you must:

• Clearly define your target
• Focus all of your attention and energy on hitting that target and
• Keep trying until you hit the target.

Simple as it seems (and simplicity is part of its beauty), this is very good path to follow with marketing.

In the article mentioned above, I talked about defining your target. Much of that article is still relevant and it’s essential to making marketing more productive and efficient.

I’m repeating it here with updates to allow for our current economic challenges.

If I thought about it hard enough, I could probably come up with a product or service that is naturally limited to a narrow, well-defined target market. But, I’ve yet to run across anything like that. All of our clients’ products and anything else that comes to mind could be sold to any number of market groups.

Separating the entire world of potential prospects into related segments is important because it lets you understand and address very specifically the pain or opportunity and the challenges your prospects face.

When prospects are carefully organized into closely related groups, you can develop and communicate messages that are truly relevant to those prospects. You can speak their language. You can much more quickly build a relationship of trust.

I’m not suggesting that you limit the number of markets you target (unless, of course, one or more of them are in an especially hard-hit industry). In a down economy it’s often necessary to expand the number of markets you sell to.

But I AM suggesting that you don’t have to deal with them all at once. You will be much more effective – and less overwhelmed – if you deal with them one at a time.

You can slice and dice your potential target markets in a number of ways – by industry, by size of company, by job function, by event (such as merger & acquisitions, real estate purchase, hiring activity), by whatever groups your prospects associate themselves with relative to your product. The more tightly you define the market(s), the better.

By way of an example, let’s say you sell legal software. You could sell to law firms or in-house corporate departments. Each has its own needs. You could sell to pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing firms, utilities, financial services and so forth. Each believes its industry is unique (some more strongly than others). You could sell to US companies only or you could sell to companies in other countries. Each country is likely to have its own legal needs. Do you see how this works?

If you attempt to appeal to everybody, you’ll end up with a very abstract or muddy message. And instead of being a hero to the people whose problems you solve, you’ll just be another solution that “sounds kind of interesting, but we’re not really sure how that relates to us”.

And that’s not all. Even within a well-defined target market, you will need to further segment your prospects depending on the role the individual plays in the buying process. In a complex sale you are dealing with a variety of “buyers” and each has their own agenda.

Let’s go back to the legal software example. To get your product accepted and purchased by a new customer, you’re going to have to deal with the people who actually use the product (lawyers, legal administrators, etc.), the people who service the product (the IT group), and depending upon the cost of the product, the people who set the budget and approve the expenditure (CFO, CEO).

Each of these “buyers” is looking for something different. The legal admin wants something that is easy to use and eliminates much of the administrative burden. The IT folks want something that won’t interfere with other systems and require a lot of servicing. The CFO wants to know about a measurable return on investment. Can you see why a single message can’t effectively communicate with all of these?

So, if Mark Joyner, the simple-ology guru, were to talk about marketing, I’m quite sure he’d tell you to start with a well-defined target market. And he’d be right.

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