Max Gladwell

When starting a new business, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of defining your market and focusing your efforts.

Business ideas often start with simple truths that define the business opportunity. If you’re writing a plan for a sock company, it might be that everyone has feet. It implies that your market is potentially everyone. You have more than six billion customers to choose from. While this is a compelling number, though, you’d be ill-advised to base your entire plan and strategy around such a general idea. Having read countless business plans and heard plenty of pitches, this is a mistake that signals inexperience and a plan that is not fully developed.

It’s always been true that entrepreneurs need to focus their marketing efforts, and this is true more than ever thanks to the Internet and the rise of so many mega-niche, micro-niche, and just plain niche markets. Global domination of the sock market may be your ultimate goal, but you have to start somewhere. You have to focus and define your target audience as narrowly as possible, especially if you’re bootstrapping or working with limited resources.

Much of how you target will be influenced by your product, and your product can be equally influenced by your target market. Again, thanks to the Internet and the rise of social media, defining a market and targeting it is easier than ever. Through social networks and other social platforms, people are self organizing and identifying in such a way that we can reach target audiences with very little effort. We can even garner feedback about how we can improve our product before expanding to a broader audience.

Let’s look at three examples of how entrepreneurs put this into practice.

Mark Zuckerberg: Many think that Facebook started as a social networking platform for colleges. In fact, it started as a network for Harvard University. Initially, you had to have a Harvard email address to sign up. Then it went to all colleges, right? Nope. Then it went to the fellow Ivy League schools. As soon as Facebook captured that market, founder Mark Zuckerberg rolled it out to all colleges, where you simply had to have a .edu email address to sign up. Finally, it was made available to…everyone. Because everyone has friends they need to keep in touch with. That’s the general idea that Zuckerberg started with, but his strategy for world domination began with the students of Harvard, the early adopters that he knew so well. And by limiting his product to that first niche market, in no way did Zuckerberg limit the future success or viability of the Facebook product.

Barack Obama: The President-elect set the stage for how political campaigns will be run in the 21st century, and it has much to do with his entrepreneurial approach. The Democrats started with an ambitious and unrealistic 50-state strategy. If it were a business plan, most investors would have passed. But it worked for Obama because he was selling the universal products of hope and change. Everyone wants to have hope, and by the end of the election everyone was looking for change. But Obama didn’t start by selling it to everyone; he started with a target market of brand evangelists. These were Obama’s early adopters, and they spread his messages of hope and change (sold his products) for him. By the end, he’d convinced many Republicans (Obamacans) to endorse and vote for him, including conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, National Review columnist Christopher Buckley (son of National Review founder, William F. Buckley), and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. It’s worth noting that it happened in this order and that each is progressively more Republican than the last. In other words, Obama’s marketing spread from the center of his target to the outer edges. Had Obama started by targeting hardcore Republicans, the campaign (his product) never would have gained the momentum it needed for a freshman senator to become the 44th president of the United States.

Hitler: This probably isn’t politically correct, nor does Hitler qualify as an entrepreneur. We don’t mean any offense and don’t take the holocaust lightly. But the man didn’t choose to invade England or North America first. Nevertheless, it’s well documented that he was schooling his forces about American cities and geography. He had a battle plan and fully intended to invade the United States. Where did he start? Austria. And barely a shot was fired because much of Austria wanted to be invaded. Austria was at the center of Hitler’s target market. Austrians (no offense) were the unwitting early adopters for Hitler’s maniacal plan for world domination. Needless to say, Hitler failed (thankfully), but that’s a different business lesson altogether.

Take Aways

In general, our advice is to focus your marketing efforts in two ways. First, target those who will have a passion for your product and the motivation to spread the message. Word of mouth is the most efficient form of marketing. If you can reach people who want to tell others about it, your marketing efforts will be magnified. The second principle, however, is to target those who have the wherewithal to most efficiently spread your message. Just because someone is motivated to tell other people doesn’t mean they’re equipped to do it with any measure of reach. This is where social media becomes a powerful tool. If you can reach someone who is (a) highly motivated to spread your message and (b) has hundreds or thousands of “friends” across the social web, that’s your ideal customer. This is the absolute center of your target market. Start here and work your way out. Many refer to this as the echo chamber.

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