Audience Axis

Find Your Ideal Audiences

Discouraging the Wrong Prospects

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Say No for blogFor all of the great prospects — the Good Fits — there are always those you don’t want as customers. These are the Bad Fits, and avoiding them should be an important goal for every small business owner.

Types of Bad Fits

Bad Fits aren’t bad people or bad companies — they’re just not right for YOU, for one reason or another.

Bad Fits typically fall into one of these categories:

Not Serious


Sometimes prospects don’t know what they want, and only discover it’s not what you offer after asking you a million questions. Sometimes they’re just digging for information with no intent to purchase from you. These prospects simply waste your time — and for most of us, that’s something in short supply anyway. [Read more…]

Lead with the Need

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Lead with the Need

Steve Jobs famously told an interviewer, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

I would add that many don’t know it even when you DO show it to them — at least not at first.

Marketing to people who know they want your product or service fails to reach all the people who could benefit from it — but who don’t know that your solution solves the problem they’re having.

When marketing a solution, start by marketing the problem.

I’ve spent years developing custom attitudinal audience segmentation research for marketing agencies and their clients.

Do you think my ideal prospects are out there looking for custom attitudinal audience segmentation research?

Not a chance.

In fact, most of them aren’t actually out there looking for research at all. They’re looking for books, conferences, podcasts, videos — anything that can help them market more effectively for their clients, develop new revenue opportunities, be invited to pitch by more prospects, and be selected over their competition.

So while I might garner a few clients here and there who are typing “attitudinal audience segmentation research” into Google (which is unlikely, I can tell you), my biggest opportunity lies with people who don’t understand what I do and would never imagine that it’s the solution they need. [Read more…]

Fishing for Fun and Profit

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Bait Matters

Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve decided to forsake the fluorescent-lit world of grocery stores, Costco and the like, and instead have elected to feed yourself and your family from the bounty of God’s green earth, without any food stamps, coupons, resellers, distributors, packagers, corporate boardrooms or franchisees getting in the middle of the process.

Your friends think you’re crazy, your spouse is considering divorce, the larder is empty and the kids are hungry.

Welcome to small business ownership.

At any rate, you’ve elected to seek out fresh fish for dinner. And not just any fish — you’re going for rainbow trout. Easy to clean, flavorful and will fit into the single cast-iron skillet you held back when you sent everything else to Goodwill and moved into that little cabin in the woods.

No other fish will do.

You have a few different options:

1) You can park yourself in a deck chair on the nearest sidewalk with a sign that says “I want rainbow trout” and wait for one to show up.

This is you if all you’ve done is build a website for your business. You’ve made a sign. Congratulations. Now pack up your deck chair and go home. No fish today. [Read more…]

7 Reasons Small Business Owners Should Give a Damn About Their Ideal Audience

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It sounds like a “big company” concern, doesn’t it? Worrying about a target audience?

We small business owners have small business concerns —and finding an “ideal audience” is just so far down the list.

In the meantime, it’s so easy just to set up our business and work for whoever walks in the door.

I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. Most of us still do.

Avoiding this question of “ideal audience” makes everything easier.

It allows us to avoid the hard work of marketing.

It means we don’t have to do anything but talk about ourselves, and what we do, and why we do it.

It allows us to build websites that look like everybody else’s.

To say, “I sell this. It comes in these flavors, these sizes, these colors, these costs.”

To say, “Door’s open. Come in and buy.”

To sit. To wait. To hope.

But ask anybody who runs their business like this, and they’ll tell you the same thing.

FAIL TO CONNECT

They’ll tell you customers don’t come — or don’t come often enough. [Read more…]

Achieve Your Own Goals

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Compass BlogYears ago, I was trying to get my (VERY LARGE) employer to let me shift my management role to a part-time job after the birth of my daughter.  The first response I got was, “We don’t do that here.”  After persisting in my efforts, I was called into my Director’s office for a “chat”.

“I’m concerned about the effect this change will have on your career here.  Don’t you want to be a Vice President someday?”

I couldn’t help it.  I laughed.  Guffawed, actually.

Why?  Because I DIDN’T want to be a Vice President. Because, even if my big mouth had stayed shut enough to get promoted to that level, I knew I’d be terrible at playing the political games required to succeed there. I didn’t want the politics, the 24-7 on-call status, the headaches. I wanted to do the work I enjoy, then go home and raise my kids.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to march to the beat of a different drummer in a big corporation. But that’s why we have our own businesses, right? So we can do what WE want?

Then why do so many of us follow a path going somewhere we don’t want to go?

We are barraged with messages about what success should look like for small business owners — and much of it, unfortunately, seems to suggest that the goal is to be a “small business” for as short a time as possible, on the way to being something much larger.

Over the years I’ve gotten a number of  suggestions about what I should be doing with my company to really “scale”. But many of them just didn’t align with what I wanted from my business.

I want to do a lot of the work I love, with people who value it and understand the critical importance of a connection with an ideal audience.

I want my work to support businesses I believe in.

I want to have enough flexibility in my schedule that I can get back to a client quickly when they need something, or take on a new project sooner rather than later. I don’t want to work myself to death, travel constantly, or sacrifice time with my family now for a big bank balance later.

I want to make enough money to be comfortable, put something away for retirement, and help my kids achieve their own dreams.

I want to help other small business owners find their own version of success.

But that’s just me.

Are you following your own compass?

Is your business built, from bottom to top, to support your goals?

Are the customers you’re serving the people you truly want to help?

We sacrifice a lot — risk a lot — to own our own businesses. If they’re not going to take us we want to be — wherever that is — what’s the point?

Have you thought about where you really want your business to go?