polarize your audience Archives by Mark Murnahan

Do you sell something that has a potential market of “everyone”? Maybe you sell widgets, doodads, or gadgets that everybody in their right mind should own. If you treat your marketing that way, you are probably pretty frustrated.

I learned this the hard way, many years ago, by thinking that “everybody” was my target market. I remember when I sought out my market with thoughts like “Who wouldn’t buy my stuff? They must be crazy if they don’t buy!” Then I parked my bicycle and quit my paper route.

I learned what it meant to target my marketing. I stopped wasting time and money trying to reach everybody with a good reason to buy my stuff. The result was that I sold a lot more stuff.

When I stopped viewing everybody as a potential customer, I also stopped seeing them all as the “deadbeats” who wore me down and just wouldn’t buy. I started loving them more each day, and it turned out that my business grew massively.

Carefully conceived targeted marketing is a huge factor of success in a business. I don’t just mean targeting your market for every customer who will buy, either. I mean targeting your market for the customers you want, and who will help your business to grow.

I want to help you to avoid this common oversight, because it is in the top five most costly business errors. It runs close behind killing a hooker (and getting caught), or naming your child Bernie Madoff.

If you try to market something by believing your ideal target market is “everybody”, it is like hunting elephants in a termite mound. You will find a lot of termites there, but very few elephants. Many people only believe this after a “less-than-ideal” profit and loss statement proves it to them.

Marketing to Morons, Idiots, and Fools

Sure, I still think that most people are just totally insane if they don’t write me a check, give me their credit card, or provide me the passwords to their massive offshore bank account. They should at least send me a box of cigars and a bottle of Bourbon to butter me up. I mean, after all, I know it is mathematically factual that I sell something which returns more money than its cost. What kind of moron can’t see that?

Let me tell you something you you probably already know. There are a whole bunch of crazy, “idiots, morons, and fools” out there who will not buy what you sell. Even if you are selling the cure for cancer, free money, or a magical 24 hour orgasm, it will not sell itself. It will also not sell to “everybody”. Marketing to “everybody” as a prospective buyer would not even be a wise marketing approach if Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and Microsoft merged.

When you consider it closely, maybe they are not all such idiots, morons and fools. Instead, maybe it is your lack of targeted marketing, using data-driven customer modeling and calculated market segmentation.

Targeted marketing is exactly why I don’t write this blog for idiots, morons, and fools. I write it for people like you, who will appreciate good marketing ideas, pass them along to others, and add to the conversation with your comments. Actually, I don’t rely on the blog comments so much, because my target audience is pretty shy, but they do share a lot.

Target Market Segmentation Challenge

My challenge to you is to take the time and effort to segment your market more carefully. Start thinking in terms of demographics, psychographics, geographics, and who your best customers really are. What spins their fan, and what can you do to make your brand more like sex, bacon, and other things they love? Where will you reach them, and what will inspire them? Use what you know, expand what you know, and get creative with your marketing.

Targeted marketing seems very foreign to many people, but the good news is that this includes your competition. Just like everybody is not a customer, everybody is not a marketing genius either. Understanding a market requires marketing talent, which comes with practice, accurate data, and the right set of marketing tools. Unless you are willing to hire a professional, you will need to practice, and practice a lot.

I think of it like a trip to the gun range. Sure, I like to bring a lot of ammunition, but it is even more important to use the right gun, and learn how to aim it well. A sniper rifle is best, but many people fear that level of commitment to their marketing. So it is best to at least learn how to aim what you have.

A Lot of Ammunition is Good, But Sharper Aim is Better!

Practice Targeting Your Market

Maybe you believed that optimizing your marketing reach would be easy in the beginning, but you surely know better by now. Look at your market penetration and consider these questions:

Are getting all you can (or at least all you want)?
Are you getting huge buyout offers?
Are you expanding your company at astonishing rates that would make Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg blush?

If your answers are “no”, then you need more practice to hone your skills. It will not kill you, and in the off chance it does, it was nice knowing you. If you are not afraid of dying, keep reading for thoughtful encouragement.

Practice your creative thinking. Practice your analytical thinking. Figure out who wants what you have, and what they will respond to favorably. Don’t try to reach them all. I know that it is hard to overlook all of those potential customers, but you will reach a whole lot more of them if your marketing is targeted appropriately.

If growing your business really matters to you, be ready to lose some sleep for it. Perfect customer modeling takes a lot of marketing talent and creativity. These are things you can improve, with enough effort.

Back to the gun analogy: You can make a lot of noise and scatter a lot of lead with a 12 gauge shotgun. It is particularly good for scaring your customers away, but not very good for hitting them in the heart, where you want your brand to penetrate. When you hit your market in the heart, you will find a lot more love flowing in both directions.

Shotgun Marketing Scares More Birds Away

If you don’t have the time or skill to become a true marksman, it is best to either rework your schedule to develop your abilities, or find a good hired gun.

I will part with some articles related to targeted marketing. There are more in my blog archive, and more yet to come. Check them out and subscribe for more bits of marketing brain food coming soon.

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Stop Trying to Make Everybody Happy!

Sure, you are in business, and you want to be certain that anybody and everybody will want to buy your products or service. You want everybody to love you, I get it. Have you ever considered the downsides? Yes, the downsides can be that your biggest fans are indifferent. They are not the kind who will drag their friends, family, and complete strangers kicking and screaming to buy your brand.

Looking around the business world, you can see many very successful instances of polarizing an audience. A good example may be in Apple Computer’s decision to not support Adobe Flash Player in their iPhone and iPad products. Other examples are available in the soft drink market with Coke and Pepsi, and extreme examples occur in politics. Who wants a wishy-washy politician, anyway?

Do Facebook and Google Polarize Their Audience?

Once you know your brand, stand strong to it. I don’t mean going around and intentionally making people mad at you, but don’t be a chicken either. Just look to Facebook for an example. Facebook is not at all afraid to polarize their audience. They are in the news for it every time they make a big change, but you don’t hear them apologize for how they run their business, or the culture of their brand. Does it work for Facebook? Consider this: If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world with over 500,000,000 (yes, five hundred million) users.

Google battles against whole countries, like China and recently Italy. I don’t think I need to go into a lengthy argument of how Google polarizes their audience. They are famously polarizing, just as most massively successful brands are.

Sure, you can say that Facebook and Google do not have any real competition, but they do, and in huge order. Many people just don’t look at them as having competition because they are so extremely large and tower over their competitors. In any case, consider who you hear more polarizing stories from … Google or Dogpile?

Today’s Murnahanism: Being famous often requires the guts to be infamous. If you just want to please everybody, give up now, before you get hurt!

Pleasing Everybody Satisfies Nobody

I have said it many times that “I do not try to please everybody, and that pleases some people very much.” I strongly believe in this statement and it is with me at all times. What it means to me is that I will not waiver from who I am just to make people like me. It seems that if they do not like me, they dislike me with emphasis. Conversely, if they like me, they like me very much and they are brand-loyal. I try to leave very little room for indifference.

So What About This Dubeshag Article?

I created a new word for our chubby or less-than-Clark-Gable friends in the social media world. I called them “dubeshags”. The genesis of the word was in good humor, and there is what some would call a very funny back-story. You can read the article and judge for yourself.

It polarized an audience in a pretty big way. I was accused of all kinds of crimes of social media for writing it, such as using popular names to build popularity. I explained my reason for writing it in an addendum to the article and it included the statement as follows:

If you think I wrote it for attention, I would have left it as a draft if I didn’t want people to read it. Sure, I want it to be read. Maybe you just blog for the entertainment of your cats, but I do it for public consumption.

The moral of the story is this: Whether people loved it or hated it, the word “dubeshag” is no longer a secret. In roughly 36 hours, dubeshag went from zero listings in Google and no recognition at all to over 500 listings in Google (and later over 25,000); over 120 Digg.com diggs; a handful of votes on Mixx.com, Reddit.com, and StumbleUpon.com; was re-blogged on many blogs; has been tweeted to hundreds of thousands of Twitter users; created an interview on Social Blade; and has flattered a few of the dubeshags who were mentioned.

Who cares if it made a few people pout? Certainly not this author.

Author’s Addendum: This was a strange example, but it does show a few key things pretty clearly. It shows that original content can spread fast. It shows that with a little know-how, you can build a lot of incoming links. It shows that even if you step on a couple toes, you can still be very well branded and have an audience like the kind I mentioned … the ones who will tell a lot of people.

It is funny that since I wrote this and was away for an event at my son’s school for a couple hours, the number of listings for dubeshag on Google keeps going up. In a short time it increased to tens of thousands of pages talking about dubeshag, and linking to the article. So it should kind of make a person wonder what happens when you do that several times per day? What happens if you do it for six months, a year, or longer?

It amazes me how some people still wonder if this whole SEO and social media thing is really worth looking into or not. To those in doubt, I hope I have given you some food for thought, and I hope you will investigate further. Stick around and read some more. You may find that there is a lot more to it than you think.