Marketing
Clients, Not Markets
Posted by
Ian Brodie on June 17th, 2011.
Understanding markets is important. Big trends. Overall pictures. What clients want generally. Where to position your firm to hit a “sweet spot”.
But when you're communicating, you must speak to clients, not markets.
Markets don't hire you, clients do. Markets don't build relationships with you, clients do.
Is that just a semantic difference? Fiddling with words?
I don't think so. Because it affects our psychology.
When we think and talk markets we think of groups, averages, generalisations.
When we think and talk of clients – or better yet, client – we think of individuals and details.
Too much market-think and our communications become generic and wishy-washy. We try to talk to everyone in the market and end up connecting deeply with no one.
Write with one specific client in mind – your ideal client, your “most likely to buy” client, your “I'd really love to work with” client – and your words have depth and meaning. You can write details. And you can connect.
Many marketers shy away from this – frightened that they're being too narrow and they'll miss out on the broader market.
That rarely turns out to be true. Not unless you're a huge megafirm that needs to be all things to all people to maintain your size.
How many clients do you really need to build a thriving business? For most of us it's a tiny percentage of the “market”. If you think about a good client and the business you get from them over a year, then for many of us the number of that sort of client we need often doesn't hit double figures.
We don't need to appeal to a broad market. We need to connect deeply with a small number of perfect clients.
So stop thinking about markets – and start thinking about those individual clients.