Business Focus: Do What You Do Best, and The Rest Falls into Place

When launching a new business or product/service, a large number of young entrepreneurs and small-business owners commit a typical error. They think that while launching a product, they must always target as many customers as possible.

This looks reasonable.

If your prospective consumer base is larger, wouldn’t you have a greater chance of success?

No.

There is a lot of pressure on businesses and their executives to come out with a new offering that caters to customers who aren’t directly in line with their strategic goals and areas of expertise. The key to success is carefully plotting out who your clients are and what they need.

Identify the specific need that you can best address. You dominate a small but significant fraction of your market whereas you are only adequate or weak in the remaining areas. Successful businesses focus on meeting customer demands in ways that set them apart from the competition.

Your niche can guide you to the right customers

You can’t please everyone, no matter how widespread you think your solutions are. For this reason, it is crucial to zero in on the audience that would most appreciate your efforts and message.

One of the best ways to engage with customers and earn their trust is to narrow your attention to a specific group. Customers are insightful, therefore they will pick up on whether or not you are being genuine, whether or not you are confident in your abilities, and whether or not you truly understand them.

So, make sure your material speaks to YOUR target demographic. Who are you trying to convince if your message is too general and generalized? The material you produce should address your ideal consumer by name and convince them that you have the solution they’ve been looking for all along.

Customers have faith in the knowledge of a specialized provider

Customers are looking to hire your product or service to do a certain function. They need to have a lot of faith in you and your solution before they’ll commit to working with you. Because of their narrower focus, specialty providers are often more trusted by their clients than their more all-encompassing competitors.

I believe Related’s Rabih Farhat said it best during the WOW3 Summit when it comes to this specific point, “We [as business owners] prioritize growth, revenue, or the bottom line and tend to forget our value proposition: does our provided solution answer a real consumer problem or challenge? Figure it out and the rest should fall in place” 

In the case of our company, we focused solely on providing a comprehensive loyalty service for our clients, and did not chase other markets that could increase our revenues unless we’re sure we can perfect it. Our customers could trust that we were pouring all our focus and resources on the loyalty program and that we are the experts.

Wide-scale marketing is ineffective; Niche marketing is easier

Your marketing communications should serve to strengthen your brand. To please everyone, however, you must either produce tailored marketing messages that speak to diverse groups of clients distinctively, or wash down your messaging to create a single theme that speaks to all customers. This is confusing in either scenario.

Online marketing efforts with broad audience settings or a large number of campaigns do not perform as well as ads with a narrow focus.

When your marketing is targeted enough to account for a specific customer on a particular platform, your ad will strike a chord with the customer, and you will experience a higher ROI than if you simply placed generic advertising in as many locations as possible.

The bottom line: Adhere to the minimalist philosophy

The notion of less is more applies not just to the number of features or products you have. This kind of thinking is universally applicable. Everything from how you conduct business to how you approach problems.

It’s not like you can decide to eliminate all but one of your product’s unnecessary features tomorrow and watch sales soar. To simplify things to that level, you need to zero in on your consumers’ most pressing concerns and avoid becoming sidetracked by irrelevant details.