How To Target Your Core Customer Without Losing Market Share #BrandBuilderPodcast

If you've gotten to the point where you have multiple segments, you know that you have multiple segments in your audience, right? You're leaving money on the table by not talking to them more specifically. Welcome to the Brand Builder podcast presented by capitalism.com I'm Max Kerwick and I advise physical product brands to find their story.

I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I invest in physical products brands. A physical products brand is arguably the most predictable path to a seven figure business. And we advise them, build them, buy them and sell them.

The show goes behind them, tracks their success, and hands you the keys to what's working.

Let's dive in.

Hey, a quick note for you Amazon sellers and brands who want to be on Amazon and haven't made it a priority yet. I am often asked about changes with reviews or changes with Amazon terms of service or changes with what's working with ranking and all of that kind of jazz. And I'm proud that I have partnered with one of our backroom members. His name is Jeff. He runs an agency that specializes specifically in optimizing your Amazon presence. So if you're a brand that is neglecting Amazon and you've heard me talking about and you're like, we know we got to get this together, or if you're an Amazon seller and you know you need to turn your attention to audience building and funnels and the stuff that is really going to grow your company, I would recommend that you give a quick shout to my boy Jeff at Turnkey Product management. They're@TurnKeyProductManagement.com and as I said, they're in the back room. They work with my team and the rest of the big companies and equity groups that are involved in our little circle. And they're usually ahead of everybody else in terms of what's working, what's compliant, what review strategies are cool and kosher and are actually effective. And they're not out there hawking a bunch of info products. They're out there actually doing it. So they're an implementation agency that just handles it for people and they run their own businesses, some of which they have built and sold. Kind of like yours truly, they. So I feel really good about partnering with them and recommending the big companies and the brands that I work with to outsource their Amazon management over to Jeff and his team. So if you're looking to add some automation into your arsenal, I would recommend the good folks@TurnKeyProductManagement.com and Jeff and I are on speed dial with each other and are collaborating on what's working. So you're always getting what's the latest and greatest in the Amazon world. So contact those guys if you're looking to outsource, automate and optimize your Amazon presence@TurnkeyProductManagement.com.

Hey, this is Max. And welcome back to this week's episode of the Brand Builder podcast. I'm going to be doing something a little bit different this week. Instead of an interview, I'm going to be answering a question that I got from a lot of people following one of our more recent episodes, and that is, what if I have multiple types of buyers or if I have multiple audience segments buying from me? It's great to build around an ideal customer, but how do I market to multiple types of people? And that's a great question. It's something that comes up a lot and especially as your business grows. Right. We build around kind of a singular customer, but obviously we have lots of different people that, that end up buying from us. Especially when you sell on a platform with, you know, half of the country on it, like Amazon.com so I'm going to give a kind of an example, a common theme that I've seen both from my own clients and from people that reached out. Right. But when we're building a brand, right, we build brands around our most profitable customers. So for a lot of people, that's not going to be just someone who's buying the product one off, Right. It's going to be, you know, if you're selling woodworking equipment you want to sell, not to the person who picks up woodworking and does it for two weeks. Right. We want to sell to the advanced hobbyist, the person that has a wood shop in their backyard that needs to buy things all the time. Right. Or an even more common one is, let's say you're selling office supplies. Right. Which is more profitable? Selling to someone who has a home office or selling to someone who is the office manager for an entire building. Right. That office manager is going to be coming back to you again and again and again and again, probably multiple times a week for a variety of different products. Right. So even if most of your clients don't look like that, Right. They're still tempting to build around because they're going to be more profitable. They're going to, you know, provide you more consistent sales. Right. If they recommend you to someone, that that person that they recommend you with is more likely to, you know, to be profitable and be more profitable, be closer to your ideal customer. And so.

But. And that's great, right? That's fine. That's. We, we want to build around our ideal customer. If that is truly the person that you want to build your brand around and the person who story you want to play a role in, then that's great. But you know, let's talk about this business to business buyer, right? If you are selling on Amazon and that's your primary platform and you're selling to those people, you're also going to get these general customers, right? You're going to get that person that has the office, the home office. You're going to get that kind of, you know, person who gets into woodworking or gardening or whatever for two weeks and just buys a couple things and then never comes back. And so the question is, how do I communicate with those people? Right. I kind of break this problem into two questions. One is how do I communicate with people who are not my core target audience? Right. And then once I answer that question, do I need to segment out my audience and serve up completely different messages to those segments? So let's start with the first question, right? How do I communicate with people who are not my target audience? The first step is you need to diagnose whether or not this is a problem or a bonus, right? And what I mean by that is sometimes we build a brand around a target audience. And I think this is what Ryan and I talked about a few weeks ago that had several people reaching out with questions. But the first step is to figure out, am I building something around, you know, this person that I think is my ideal customer? And I'm creating messaging and design and images and ads that I think that that person is going to like. And then I'm just getting a completely different audience in, you know, I'm trying to sell to entrepreneurs, but instead I'm getting homemakers, right? That's a problem, right? That's an issue that you are going to need to figure out why that's happening. What is it about my message that is appealing to people? And again, you know, I'm going to sound like a broken record, but, you know, the easiest way to figure that out is actually talk to your customers, right? And figure out what is it about, you know, what I put out there, how did you find us? What did you like about us? All that kind of stuff. So that's a problem that needs to be solved, right? But the other situation that happens a lot again, especially on Amazon, is maybe you're just getting extra people who don't necessarily look like your target, but they're still good customers, right? And the way that you diagnose that is you kind of ask a couple questions, right? Are there common threads between your target and the non target people? Right. Do they care about similar things? Are they trying to achieve similar things? Do they see themselves as similar type of people? If the answer is yes, then you're just thinking about your target customer in a new way, right? We've shifted from thinking about kind of this demographic profile to something that's more based around psychographics and behaviors and things like that. And they see themselves as similar types of people. Maybe one is a little bit older and female and the other is a little bit younger and male. But the story that they're telling about their life is similar. And the role that your brand plays in that story is similar too. In that case, you don't really have to do anything and you're already doing things, right? You're just getting different types of people than you expected. If the answer is no, then you need to ask what is appealing about my brand to these people? If the stories are different, why are they buying? Right now the easy answer is usually something like price, you know, I'm using air quotes here, but the kind of ambiguous quality, whatever that means to them. And then the last thing is awareness, right? So in the case of Amazon, if you are high ranking, you're going to get, you know, just kind of a random assortment of people who are, you know, if you're doing well on ranking, you're going to get a random assortment of people who are looking at these products. So again, they're not, it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? You're, they're still potentially good customers. They're just not your core customers. They're just not who you're building the brand around. And any decent sized business, right? And especially as you get larger, you're going to get a lot of people who don't look exactly like your ideal customer, right? They might only look partially like it. They might be buying because of convenience or on accident, honestly. And that's no big deal.

Now the second question, which is a little bit more detailed once you've kind of figured that out, is do I need to segment my audience and serve up different messages to those segments? So essentially you have two options depending on what you're able to diagnose with question one, right? The first option is that you can continue to build around your current target audience and not worry about, you know, maybe this more general Amazon audience is buying from you. And that's fine. Right? And that's especially good if you're an early stage and you don't have a ton of time, you don't have a ton of manpower, and you don't have a ton of money to devote to building out different messaging for different segments, no matter what stage your business is. Again, not every single person that walks in the door is going to be your exact ideal customer. In fact, I would argue that most of them won't be. I always say that we build brands around the ideal customer because those are the ones that are most predictive of our future success, not because they are the only customers that are predictive of our future success. Right. Again, these are the people that if all of our customers looked like this, we would be successful beyond our wildest dreams. And a lot of times the person that we describe, you know, when we're, when I'm sitting in a room with a client building out a profile of like, what we wish our customers looked like, if you know what, based on the research that we did and everything that like kind of our absolute ideal person, there's a really solid chance that that person doesn't even actually exist in real life and that most people are only going to look 80% like that. Right. So if you're getting, you know, these general market people or, you know, whatever, this other segment of people coming in anyways, clearly what you're doing is working for them. Right. And it will likely continue to do that as you grow. Right. You're going to continue getting people in the door that don't look exactly like you're your audience in the same way that you're doing it now. So option one is to continue to serve those people without specifically marketing to them. Right. And again, this is what I would recommend. If you're still kind of fairly early stage or that you know, your current target market is more profitable than these other types of customers that are coming in. So again, if you are successful and you have a way of kind of bringing in office managers who manage an entire office, you should continue to focus on them rather than, you know, the occasional person that has a home office. If you know that they're more profitable, if you know that you can go out and get them, that person is going to be worth hundreds, thousands, potentially tens of thousands of dollars more to you over their lifetime than the person who's just occasionally buying one or two things for the office. Now, the second option, and this is where things from a marketing perspective start to get interesting. Cool. And a lot more difficult is to segment out your audience into kind of two plus groups. So this obviously requires stepping into some pretty sophisticated marketing, right? In order to do this effectively, you need to understand what the groups have in common, right? So what are kind of the common threads that bind them together and then the specific concerns that they have that are different from one another. And if you don't have those understandings, you can't really do segment marketing. So once you understand those differences, that's when you can start sending specific messages that are kind of more tailored to their concerns. Segment marketing is a natural step in the progression. Once your business gets to a certain level, it's kind of where the market is going. And I would even argue that the market is probably going a step beyond segment marketing and more kind of one to one marketing. Some of the larger clients that I've worked with, they don't even call them segments anymore. They literally have departments that are devoted to one to one marketing. And that is using AI, using really, really kind of advanced behavioral and survey based segmentation to serve up almost like a personalized landing page for every single person that lands. Again, that is really, really sophisticated and almost impossible to do if you don't have like a huge marketing department and a large budget or whatever. But it's easy to kind of start taking some baby steps down that path. Especially if you understand I have, you know, two different audiences and they have different concerns, right? So the like second marketing, again, it makes sense if you're kind of gotten to the size where, you know, you know, you have enough money to, you know, to hire someone to manage it, to start putting in, or if you're getting such a high volume of people that are not in your target audience, or the people that are not in your target audience are spending way, way, way more money than your target audience, right? That you feel like you're kind of leaving money on the table. Like, that's probably about the point that it makes sense to start segment marketing. So the way that we look at that is again, you have to find, okay, what are the things that these people have in common? Let's use the office supply, right? You know, they, let's say you're buying, you know, TV mounts or monitor stands or whatever. There's some things that people have in common, right? They want them to look good. They want, you know, the room to look professional and modern and all that kind of stuff. And the way that the room looks is a reflection of who they are as a person. But then again, you're. Those segments are going to have specific things that they care about. The office manager is going to care about. You know, can I get a bulk discount? Can I get all of these in at once? Are they easy to install? Is they, you know, are. Do they, you know, accommodate multiple different types of computers and mounts and things like that versus the, the person that's buying for themselves, right. For their office is like, how good is this going to look in my office? Right? How is this going to look when people step in my home and, you know, they see, you know, this professional setting that I built for myself kind of thing. And so you're going to build out some very, very specific messages or, or let's, let's say gardening, right? You have some people who are, you know, almost need a more commercial setup that are, you know, doing a full kind of herb garden that they use on a regular basis. They're growing their own fruits and vegetables. They're trying to eat as much out of their own garden. That person is going to have very different concerns from the person who's, you know, I just want to, you know, be able to grow. I'm trying my first, you know, you know, collection of herbs or something like that. And I'm just going to try this for a couple of weeks and see how it goes. So again, figuring out, okay, what do those people have in common and then what are the kind of specific things that they need to hear that are different, right? If I'm growing a lot of stuff on my own and I'm doing it 365 days a year, right. I need to know how long this stuff's going to last. I'm going to need to know kind of what the capacity is of these grow lights that I'm buying or whatever it is.

So again, you need to kind of, in order to do that effectively, you need to have a method of putting those people in the different buckets, right? So maybe it's a question. Maybe you use a survey funnel, if you're familiar with the, the ask method, right? You can use a survey funnel to warm both warm, cold traffic, but then also, you know, segment people out on the front end, right, and understand kind of what it, what it is they care about. You know, maybe they're in different stages. Maybe they're, you know, more intense and they do more of this type of work. Maybe they're buying for more people. And you can kind of understand as they enter your audience, like, okay, what does this person care about what are they doing? And you can do that with a couple survey questions, right? A couple of quick, quick, quick, easy questions. And then from there they enter like their own email flow, right? Or they go on a list and the look alike that you're targeting to on Facebook has a different set of ad messages or something like that. The, the follow up message that they get after their order is different, which I know that's a lot harder to do on Amazon. But if you're doing Shopify, right, you can kind of pre segment out people into lists and things like that. But regardless.

This is something that large companies do way, way, way better than small companies because they have a lot more money and people to throw at. But if you've gotten to the point where you have multiple segments, you know that you have multiple segments in, in your audience, right? You're leaving money on the table by not talking to them more specifically. So I highly encourage you to again, talk to your customers, right? Understand the people that are buying from you and then understand like how do they break up into groups? Because you can definitely, A, you're going to build a stronger relationship with them and your brand if you can serve up stuff that is really, really, really relevant, right? And B, you know, as an outgrowth of that, you're going to be more profitable. You're going to get higher share of wallet from those people because they're going to see themselves in the brand even more, right? So the ideal situation is that you have kind of a, a single common thread that binds people together, right? And then within that you have different groups that, you know, look a little bit different, right? You have the office manager, the home office person, and then you have, you know, maybe someone who's buying in a retail store or whatever. That's not the best example, but you know, that, that gives you an idea of like, okay, here are three different types of people. They all want something that looks good. They all want something that works well. They all want something that's going to last. But you know, this person's concerned about buying in volume. This person's concerned about, you know, productivity at home and how that's going to work for them. And then this person's concerned about how it's going to look in a retail environment. So again, those things are pretty.

They'Re not hugely different, but they're different enough that if you're able to hit that person with a very targeted message, they're probably going to like it more. So again, hope this was helpful. Hopefully this kind of clears things up. A little bit on, you know, kind of an ideal customer and the purpose of an ideal customer versus segment marketing. But again, I really like answering these questions. So if you have anything, anything that you're curious about in your business from a branding or marketing perspective, please, please, please send me an email. Again, My email is maxrandbuilderstrategy.com and I will either respond to you and or I will, you know, try to answer it on air here and release a podcast episode. So drop me a line if you have questions. And if any of you are going to be at the ECOM Hub Summit up in Vancouver next week, I will be speaking there as well. So, you know, don't hesitate to come up and say and yeah, otherwise I will, you know, you guys will hear from me next week. Thanks.

Hey brand Builders. We hope you enjoyed this podcast by capitalism.com check out our website for upcoming events and additional content about building businesses, building brands and investing. My name is Max Furwick and my mission in life is to transform businesses into brands. If you have any feedback about the show, any guests you want to see case filled, these covered topics explored, or frankly, just any questions about branding in general, just shoot me an email@maxmaxrandbuilderstrategy.com again, that's maxrandbuilderstrategy.com and I'd love to hear from you. One quick note, if you could subscribe to the podcast or even leave us a review on itunes. These things really do make a big difference in helping us book amazing guests and then also helping people just like you find the podcast. So thank you. Thanks and we'll see you next time.

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