From Narrow to Specific: How Focusing on Your Ideal Target Audience Will Boost Your Sales with Dean Jackson and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #454

We're thinking about the before unit of your business, meaning think about it as a separate unit of your business whose whole responsibility is to act as a supplier to your during unit. Meaning their whole job is to deliver people who are ready to do whatever it is you do.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www. Geniusnetwork.com. breakthrough DNA. The report that me and Dean Jackson created that we have on ilovemarketing.com goes through the before, during and after units of a business and the eight profit activators. That is often a really good place to start because you want to select a single target market and then you want to start building and putting your efforts towards the process of communicating to them. And not look at your marketing as if it's like, I got to sell more stuff. It's like, do you have a before unit, a during unit, or an after unit? Some people don't have a lead problem, they have a conversion problem. Some people don't have a conversion problem. They can convert anyone. As long as they have them, they don't have enough leads. Some people pay no attention to the after unit, which is after someone's given them money. They keep spending all their attention on people that are trying to get new leads. They ignore the ones they got and they don't orchestrate referrals and they don't get repeat business. So you want to look at the before, during and after units of your business. Dean, can you yell at us?

Yell at you? That's perfect. So much great discussion there. Part of the thing that makes the biggest difference in converting leads is selecting the right leads to generate. And if you, the further you can go in identifying who would be your ideal target audience. We talk about that in the Breakthrough DNA book. We talk about the idea of selecting a single target market. That's the first profit activator. So part of the thing that you have to decide or discover is do you have visible prospects or invisible prospects? And that is going to determine how you're able to reach out to them. And the distinction is, let's say, let's use chiropractors as an example. If your target audience is chiropractors, those are visible prospects. You can get a list of them and say, there's one, there's one, there's one. You can directly communicate to Dr. Jones, who's a chiropractor. Now, a chiropractor's prospects are invisible because you can't get a list of people who just twisted their back in the shower this morning. That's an invisible prospect. So you have to treat that differently. And when you understand which type of prospect you have it, if you have visible prospects, the best thing you can do is narrow your focus to upstream exactly who you're looking for. And I make the distinction between selecting meaning you doing the selecting versus trying to cast as wide a net as possible so that you get selected. And that's what most people are doing. Most people are doing. They're trying to open up the the net or cast a wide net so that people will select them. And it's very difficult for you to let go of the idea that what if I focus on this particular target audience that this other person is not going to choose me. And that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about you proactively going to find them. So the first exercise that have people do in selecting a target market is to knock yourself out. Make a list of every possible market that you could potentially help that you could serve. And I say, you know, you look at the example of Procter and Gamble who's you know, billions and billions of dollars. They've got 23 individual billion dollar brands that all serve very different markets. They seem to even compete with themselves. If you think about even just the laundry detergent category, they've got five different billion dollar brands just in the laundry detergent category. And they're all focused on a specific market attribute that somebody who wants to get their clothes as white as possible is a viable target audience. And they're going to choose tide. People who want to get tough stains out are another viable segment of the market and they're going to choose era. Some people want their clothes to smell great so there's sunlight for for them. Some people just want to throw it all in and not ruin anything. So there's cheer, all temperature cheer, whatever your need or your aspiration is with laundry. Procter and Gamble has a very specific segment for that. And that's how you know rather than trying to make something broad to include as many people as possible. The more narrow you make it, the more specific you can get. I think that's a big piece that drives how you then in profitector to compel people to raise their hand.

Yeah. And I'll tell you like, by the way, we're doing an I Love Marketing meetup on April 26th with an elf member, elf coaching named Russ that has listened to every episode of I love Marketing like we have over 350 episodes. And what I often will tell people that want to learn marketing. It's funny when you're in the marketing business, it's so weird because if you ask 20 people how to define marketing, you're going to get 20 different answers. Because what the hell is marketing? Some people think it's branding. I've always liked the quickest path to the sale. I always use the distinction. Selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get them on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned. By the time they're talking to you, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified, predisposed to do business with you. So selecting a single target market is critical. Like to go to the laundry detergent example, I love what Dean just shared. In the 1950s, they were doing surveys with. Maybe they, I don't think they called them focus groups back then, but maybe they did. I don't know. When did focus. Do you even know when focus group started, Dean?

No, I don't, but I would love to know.

Yeah, I will probably do a Google search here. But they would survey people and like, why are you switching detergents? They would notice at point of purchase in grocery stores and the common answer people would get was, you know, they're bored. I mean, so Procter and Gal, so they had Tide, which was, you know, blue and orange, and then they reversed it and then created surf and knocked themselves up. Same color scheme, but just reversed. Tide, ocean, surf, ocean, same shit. But consumers, like, if they're going to get bored with our product, let's just get them bored with our other product, right? And they'll keep switching back and forth. And so they figured out how to extend lifetime value just by switching color schemes and switching names and knocking themselves off. And one thing I remember, like with kitty litter is people the number one, like kitty litter. When they first invented kitty litter, people would, you know, like, they're trying to come up with all kinds of ways to sell more kitty litter. And some, like one of the marketing execs decided to do a survey of people that bought kitty litter. What was the biggest thing that they, you know, is their issue? What do they want that's better? They're like, it stinks, it smells bad. So this person's like, let's start scenting it. So they created scented kitty litter. And I'm allergic to cats. I've never had a cat, but it's like, it's one of these things. Oftentimes it's the things that are just so obvious, but no one even notices them. And it's thought that marketing is good or bad. It's how it's used. It's a tool like anything else. Marketing is not bad any more than food is not bad. There's bad food and there's good food, there's healthy. So it's all how you use it. The reason I think most people don't do well with marketing is for one, they undervalue the importance of it. Or secondly, they have been taught a bunch of horseshit like in college courses or whatever about branding and they have to unlearn effective marketing. And there's a preconceived notions of what marketing even is or how it works. But as far as I'm concerned, like whatever you need to do or say that is as long as it's legal, moral and ethical, that is going to get people to buy from you, become interested in you, come into your world and then you start the conversation. And so Dean is really good at simplifying and clarifying that. So Dean, what advice would you give for people to become way, way, way, way effective at the use and application of marketing?

Okay, so part of the thing to simplify it to its core is that we're thinking about the before unit of your business. Meaning think about it as a separate unit of your business whose whole responsibility is to act as a supplier to your during unit. Meaning their whole job is to deliver people who are ready to do whatever it is you do. And that way all we need to focus on. I was recently reading about, about Michelangelo, how when he was creating the his first statue of Hercules, he studied anatomy to learn the underpinnings of what makes the shape of a body, what he had to understand. How do the bones and the musc muscles and the tissues all work together to support this outer shape that we're having. So if we think about, a lot of times people think about marketing as the outer side of this. If we're going to create a David, we're going to create, you know, this amazing, beautiful statue. What's important is that we start with what's going to prop that up, what's the undergirding of it? And that's the first four profit activators we talk about. Just select who's our single target market. Then we need a simple way to get those people to raise their hand to just say, I'm interested in that. And sometimes, often the, the best Things that we do are offer somebody a book that is going to telegraph their intention or their desire or their need for whatever the book recommends. I did a book with my girlfriend, we did a book called the Adult Acne Cure. Now, if you offer a book called the Adult Acne Cure, who's going to ask for that other than somebody who's got adult acne? Now, once somebody raises their hand. Now we need in profit activator 3 to educate and motivate them. What would they need to know and what would they need to hear or be convinced of before? In Profit Activator four, we make an offer that makes it super easy for them to get started. And so if you just go through the process of thinking about those four steps in the simplest of terms, I call it like wizard thinking. If all you had to do was say, here's what I want people to do, here's who I want. That's my profit activator number one. Here's what I want them to just raise their hand, leave their name and email address so they've turned from an invisible prospect to a visible prospect. And then what would I say to this one person if when they ask for that book, it was a magic portal to your office and they knock on the door, they poke their head in and they say, hey, I'm here about the Adult Acne Cure book. How would you imagine that conversation with them to educate them about everything that you know? And you're looking for five star prospects, people who are willing to engage in a dialogue, friendly and cooperative. They know what they want, they know when they want it, and they'd like you to help them. All of the whole conversation is just about, you know, checking off those things on the box and then making the best prescription, the offer that makes it super easy for people to get started. What's the most compelling offer that you could make to somebody? You know, what's the best way to get somebody started on something? Especially if the relationship that you're going to have with them is going to extend into the after unit, where you've got a monthly recurring revenue or an annual recurring revenue or a higher lifetime value beyond the single transaction up on the front. That's a great way to just kind of guide your thinking around it and then look for the most elegant, easy, lucrative and fun solutions to make those steps happen.

And the reason I brought up April 26, if you guys just want to see how we have trained and launched a lot of people into learn, teaching and marketing, that's what we did with the I Love Marketing podcast, and one of the things I will often tell people is go listen to the first 10 original episodes@ilovemarketing.com that me and Dean recorded back in starting in 2010, because that's when we started that first podcast. The Breakthrough DNA Breakthrough Blueprint is awesome, and when you read it after this discussion, it'll have a whole other context and meaning. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com subscribe subscribe if you'd like access to the show Notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit ilove marketing.com forward/454.