"Everyone is not your customer." — Seth Godin
You cannot be all things to all people. Let your competition try to serve everyone — and watch them fail from a comfortable distance. One of the most powerful benefits of defining a precise target audience is that it clarifies your company's positioning and makes every downstream decision — from product design to marketing to pricing — vastly easier to execute.
I learned the real power of targeted markets when we opened our D.C. office. I had been lobbying our Board to enter Florida and California instead. Three weeks later my wife and I loaded two dogs into an SUV and headed to Washington with no product built for the market, no operational team, and very limited knowledge of how the federal legislative ecosystem worked.
Government agencies? We didn't have the financial stamina for federal procurement cycles. Trade associations? Almost everything we'd built for state-level associations had no relevance at the national level. Lobbyists? We discovered they didn't actually track legislation the way our platform assumed. Who was left? Legal librarians.
Legal librarians were often responsible for comparing different versions of legislation — a laborious process at the federal level where omnibus bills ran hundreds of pages. Our bill comparison tool handled this analysis automatically. We had come to D.C. to sell a robust legislative tracking service. We actually sold a $5,000 bill comparison tool with a robust set of bundled tracking features. The distinction matters — and it only emerged because we stopped assuming we knew the market and started actually listening to it. Eleven months and twenty-two days after we arrived, my wife and the dogs were able to drive back to God's country.
Best Practices For Audience Development
◆ Focus on the motives behind the behaviors — not just demographics, but psychographics and situational pressures. ◆ Build personas that are fictional but realistic. A persona without a problem to solve is just a description. ◆ Choose one primary persona per product or service. Serve that one person exceptionally well before expanding. ◆ Tell your persona's story from their perspective — not from yours.