How to find your business story: Who
One of my favorite purchases was an Arc’teryx hoodie, which I found on a blog titled “The Perfect Hoodie.” The blog described the details that went into the zipper, the cuffs, the lay-flat hood—and I immediately thought the team at Arc’teryx designed something just for me and my season of life, for the person I was trying to become—a minimalist tech bro (yikes, I know). It was like they knew me. I still wear that hoodie over ten years later and it still gives me that feeling.
These details matter more in our marketing than we may realize. Certain phrases, colors, and photography matter to this or that person. By dialing in who you’re communicating to, you can create a story where they immediately think, “Yes! That’s exactly how I feel. They get me.”
That’s the end goal of marketing: Identifying who we’re talking and how we’re talking to them to generate more revenue.
So, who is your ideal audience?
The first question is the most important question and should absorb the most amount of time in your discovery. Modern marketers see this question as identifying your ICP, or ideal customer profile.
Most people I’ve worked with over the years answer that question by way of demographic information: A VP-level buyer on the finance team overseeing FP&A, 90% male, roughly 45 to 65 years old, and so on. That doesn’t tell me very much about how to communicate to that person because there are too many of those people in the world, and that answer also doesn’t illuminate anything useful for what motivates them to buy.
The more advanced responses include personas: “Frank” is an avid golfer with two kids and enjoys church on Sundays. On the surface this is a little more helpful because I’m able to better see the picture of who this person is, but it still misses the mark of what we’re really looking for.
The reason is that, in any given market, you have a TAM (total addressable market), SAM (serviceable available market), and SOM (serviceable obtainable market), but within SOM you have your ideal client you’d like to work with. This is not everyone. The ideal client is a tiny fraction of whom you could actually serve.
For example, let’s say you’re a wealth management firm who wants to target high-net-worth accredited investors. Google tells me there are about twenty million people in the United States who fit that description, or your TAM. But to really move the needle in your business for this year, you might want to convert a hundred of those people into paying clients, a tiny fraction of your SOM. You might even want to convert ten of the right people who fit your culture, processes, and current team—an even tinier fraction. Maybe those ten people have the right network or partnerships that could be a big deal for the success of your firm. If that’s the case, let’s focus on the ten investors you’d like to work with this year.
In short, to market your firm, don’t think about the twenty million people of your TAM. Focus on the ten people you want to work with today.
What we’re after is not demographic information but psychographic information: Perceptions, challenges, fears, dreams, and so on. We want to unearth what, deep down, compels this person to take action. Be as specific as possible here. This is where isolating the ideal client becomes essential. What is it about your ideal ten clients that makes them tick?
Perhaps they’re people who collect watches (pun intended) and they’re obsessed with the tiniest details of German-made versus Swiss-made chronographs and how they’re powered, their design, what they signal to others who see that time piece on their wrist.
Perhaps they do golf and enjoy church on Sundays. But are they the “I’m just here for the booze” golfers or the type that hires a coach and is working on their mid-fairway wood game at seven on Friday mornings? They go to church, sure, but are they Baptist or Presbyterian or Catholic? Are they PCA or PCUSA? Each segment has certain motivations, ways of seeing the world or of doing things, and your marketing should speak to them and only them.
But how does these details connect to a purchasing decision? The short answer is people like people like themselves.
That same sensation applies to services as well as products. Think back to our accredited investor ICP: Is this the kind of accredited investor that built a successful landscaping business from scratch out of the back of a pickup, or did this person come into wealth because his father built a successful hedge fund in Connecticut? The pitch deck to the former should appeal to grit and hard work, featuring photos of the Americana you might find in a Budweiser commercial, while the latter should appeal to elegance and sophistication, featuring photos of a cosmopolitan lifestyle, perhaps a winery in the south of France.
Remember, people like people like themselves. Demonstrating that you deeply understand this person’s culture, desires, challenges, and so on helps them feel seen, that you can actually help them with their needs.
Now, we can’t portray in our marketing materials a culture or brand that is not authentic to who we are as a company, leading to an even worse outcome of being a poser. We can’t be all things to all people. Counterintuitively, the more specific we can be the more universal our appeal. I’ll talk more about that in a forthcoming series when we talk about writing.
The business reason for this principle of ideal clients and psychographic information is simple: Educating buyers is expensive. We don’t want to educate the buyer—we want to find the buyer who, twenty minutes into the first call, says, “Where do I sign?”
In other words, an outcome of this process is to alienate everyone who will slow your funnel and sales process because they’re eating up your resources.
Of course, all these details about our ideal buyer impact every other decision downstream—operations, processes, pricing, materials, hiring and firing, and so on—but there’s more to the story before we get there. We’ll pick that up next time.
As always, we’re grateful to serve.
