I recently read the book This is Marketing by Seth Godin, which really changed many of my views about marketing. In my 20 years of mentoring small business owners, I defined marketing as principally a “one-to-many” approach vs. sales being a “one-to-one” approach. A concept from the book that really resonated with me was that it does not matter what youtellpeople about your business and your Why, which is typically what we think marketing is about. What really matters is what otherpeoplesay about your business and your Why by creating a movement. And to create a movement requires that you start with the smallest viable market that you can really get to love you.
One of the greatest challenges with launching a new business, product, or service is to get enough people to care about it. The mistaken belief is that you can get more people to care about your business, product, or service by casting a wide net. Unfortunately, this approach means that your marketing efforts are spread too thin to create any meaningful momentum. According to Godin, rather than go far and wide with your marketing effort, it is better to create a movement by hyper-targeting a very small group that benefits the most from your offering and giving them an incredibly great experience that they are likely to share.
Creating a Movement
There are thousands and thousands of businesses out there yelling at you as a prospect with their marketing efforts to encourage you to select them. Collectively, they create a huge amount of noise. Bigger and better-funded businesses focus on turning up the volume and frequency of their paid message traffic to try to be heard above the competition. Unfortunately, most small businesses do not share the same budget or brand awareness to compete in this type of world. That is why as a small business owner, you need to create a movement.
A lot of what people think about when it comes to marketing is simply buying people’s attention with advertising. Advertising is essentially just renting the eyeballs from some form of content creator such as a TV show or magazine or their digital equivalent such as streaming videos, social media, etc. Advertising is basically yelling at generally disinterested people in the hope that some may hear what you are saying. The more money you have in an advertising budget, the more yelling you can afford to do to hopefully get people to hear you and drown out the competition. This strategy is no longer the answer for most small businesses and microenterprises.
What Godin points out is that advertising is not marketing. Marketing is about creating change and momentum to help people discover and understand you have a solution to their problem.
Smallest Viable Market
Although it may sound counter-intuitive to focus on a tiny market when most business owners want to attract a larger and larger audience, it is vital that you create the most possible value for a customer, which gets diluted when you try to please a larger target market. The concept of being more deliberate about having a hyper-focused customer profile was echoed by Rich Litvin in his book The Prosperous Coach, where he outlines the four-step framework for attracting the right kind of coaching client. You want to serve your customers so powerfully, according to Litvin, that they will sing your praise to their network of friends and co-workers. This intense focus on the smallest viable market is where you can generate the greatest impact and create a movement.
Even when you believe that your offering serves a larger market, the key, according to Godin, is not to go wide but to instead focus on the smallest viable market. Marketing is not about advertising but change, and change is hard to sell because people have strong preferences, and established habits, and are loyal to specific brands. Therefore, they do not like to change and would rather deal with the devil they know than consider one they do not, so they maintain the status quo. Moreover, people tend to prefer proven solutions over new ones even if the current solutions are inferior in many ways, which is why change is so hard.
As a small business with limited resources, focusing on the smallest viable market when introducing a new product or service means that you can better understand their needs and desires. With the smallest viable market, you can demonstrate in very concrete and relatable ways how your offering is the right solution for them.
The idea of viability should not be lost in this definition. The audience needs to be large enough to be worthwhile to address and create momentum but not so large as to dilute the focus of your messaging. It is this small yet viable audience that will benefit most from your product or service that will become your social agents and evangelists that will bring the message of your offering to a larger audience. Because your product or service has so powerfully met the needs and desires of your smallest viable audience, not only will they use it, but they will create a movement by sharing their delightful experience and recommending you to others, thereby building momentum and scaling your offering to others outside your smallest viable market.
The reason it makes so much sense to focus on the smallest viable market is that it gives you the opportunity to create a funnel of evangelists and social agents. There is a principle known as cumulative advantage, also known as the “Matthew Effect,” that states that once a business gains a small advantage over others in its industry, that advantage will compound over time into an increasingly larger advantage. Therefore, by creating these early wins with your smallest viable market, you will enable your business to scale over time based on compounding.
As advertising costs keep rising and the return on ad dollars spent keeps falling due to ad fraud and the greater amount of noise, the average customer rarely exceeds their customer acquisition costs. Therefore, small businesses with minimal resources need not try to attract average customers. Instead, they must rely on other ways to acquire new customers by creating a way to attract brand advocates who absolutely love your product or service and don’t just like it.
Don’t use paid advertising to introduce your offering to a wide swath of potential customers. Instead, use your advertising to add gasoline to the fire that is your smallest viable market. Your goal is that you want more and more sales leads to come from your social agents and evangelists through active referrals and word-of-mouth than from direct marketing ads. This means limiting your ad spends to just that tiny niche that you know will love vs. just like your product or service and let the principle of cumulative advantage drive growth.
Of course, this strategy of growth through creating a movement requires that you show up regularly to create familiarity. Repetition and consistency create a memorable message. Offer a tremendous amount of value to create the desire in customers to want to help others by sharing your product or service. And be committed to the long game.
The 5 Steps of Effective Marketing
In the end, effective marketing for most small businesses should not rely on old, outdated marketing concepts that rely on expensive and ineffective direct advertising but should instead involve creating a movement by following five steps outlined by Godin:
Have an offering worthy of a story that others can talk about. This means understanding what your customer is willing to buy and creating an exceptional experience. People respond to stories. Tell them why you created your product or service and how it came about and what obstacles you faced in your journey.
Narrow your marketing efforts to focus on the smallest viable market that can really benefit most from your offering. If you make those people very satisfied, the rest of your marketing will be gradually spread with authenticity. Your offering will be grounded in the wants and needs of this audience.
Tell them a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of this tiny audience. In marketing, we want to inject our message into the conversation that is already taking place in a prospect’s mind. Stories resonate and connect us. Knowing your own story and the story behind your offering gives you ideal insight into how to market it.
Spread the word through evangelists and social agents. Once you understand your smallest viable market, you can create easily shareable content that they can share through social media, launch planning, interviews, and other ways to bring attention to your product or service.
Show up regularly for the long haul. Anyone who has a popular blog, a long-lived podcast, a regular newsletter, or any other form of published content will tell you that it is only over time that you can build a true and lasting relationship with readers. It takes time to deepen your relationships with prospects, hone your craft, and the goals you share with your community. The ongoing conversation you have with people is a demonstration of your commitment to your values and your willingness to be a thought leader.
How can you create a movement by focusing on the smallest viable market that will love your product or service so much they will happily tell others?
