Marketing Ninja

On the “buy path” in my company’s e-commerce system we reserve a tiny slice of on-screen real-estate for customer comments about their pre-purchase experience with us.

These comments are then sent to all of the employees who care to subscribe to them (and one customer support person who has to respond to any service issues that are raised in the comments).

I get the customer comments report automatically sent to my work inbox every day – usually customers leave us comments like this:

Please place package on the third step of my house behind the garden wall (shipping instructions)

I found your product through the Internet (referral source)

Loved the trial! (general comment)

As you can imagine, most of these aren’t particularly useful for a marketer like myself. But every now and then we get something like this that wistfully tugs at our heartstrings:

I would have made a larger purchase if your product had included obscure features X, Y, and Z

Our instant, unreasoned reaction to reading such words is to go “OH OH OH OH WE CAN GET MORE REVENUE IF WE ONLY ADD FEATURES X, Y, AND Z, BRILLIANT! SEND THIS TO THE ENGINEERS AT ONCE!”

But then we have to accept the sad, cold, reality – the amount of money spent researching, developing, and supporting those features wouldn’t net us a realizable return within an acceptable time frame. It’s the time-old problem of some guy who is just outside of our target market asking us to open up our market focus just a little bit to include his needs.

Just outside our target market

Unfortunately, all too often customers like these reside just oustide of our target market (depicted above.)

The Truth About Targeting

Targeting isn’t some stupid archaic thing that marketers do because that’s what they were told to do in marketing school. It’s an activity that we all have to do in order to achieve:

• Communicative differentiation
• Product differentiation
• Specialization
• and most importantly, profit optimization.

Targeting is one of the most important parts of profit optimization, for two reasons – the first of which is price. Different target markets need different prices in many instances.

Let’s say you designed a piece of task / project management software. If you were trying to sell the same piece of software both to individual consumers and to businesses / organizations you’ll find that these two markets are very, very different animals. High price points will drive away individual consumers and price points that are too low will make your product seem uncredible in the eyes of corporate buyers.

The second reason is that targeting affects your sales volume. In a B2C (business to consumer) environment you’re likely going to be selling a high volume of lower-cost goods to individual consumers, whereas in a B2B environment you’re going to sell a low volume of higher-cost goods to organizations.

And within the B2C and B2B markets there are even more specific targeting distinctions that have to be made. But once your company has settled on a target it needs to stick with a targeting strategy until:

• it determines that the current targets are less profitable than others OR
• it invents a way to pursue multiple targets through product or customer segmentation.

So back to those customer comments – it’s a major bummer when someone lays money on the table right in front of you and says “do this and I will pay you X,” but more often than not we have to say “sorry, dude, but you aren’t like, in our target market and stuff.” Well, we don’t actually say that, but we think it.

I find that a lot of web-based startups, particularly those driven mostly by early adopter feedback, fall victim to trying to please everybody. You can’t, and you shouldn’t. You have to stick to what you know will bring realizable returns and stick with it.

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