Aaron Gerdes

Boost marketing success: Targeting your product/service let’s you provide less bulk with more meaning.

Think the last marketing message aimed at you that “broke through”. Here’s what got it that far: Targeting. The message tapped into your circumstance, interests, sense of humor, or style (probably in that order).

From a marketing perspective, a specialized product or service is key to success. But why not pursue the widest appeal possible? People’s minds have become so good at filtering out things they’re not interested in. We’ve adapted to cope with chaotic sensory input (or crappy advertising).

We’re naturally interested in things concerning us. Something targeted to a “Seattle-based business owner with clients scattered all over and slightly tech-geek inclination” is much more likely to get my attention than something targeted to “any business owner, anywhere, with any interests”.

There are many ways to narrow your target audience. A few of them are:

• By geographic region
• By industry
• By organization size/individual income
• By organization style/individual personality
• To be compatible with another product/service
• By acceptable risk level

When the “cult of simplicity” talks about making your product or service leaner, understand you can market to a smaller group and get more from it. By increasing your ratio of user success to features (specializing your product/service), you’re gaining benefits: more targeted marketing, a differentiator (or unique selling proposition, etc), more successful (happy, loyal) users, and the repeat business and buzz that brings. And you don’t have to play “feature cold-war” with the competition.

Remember: An object trying to move in all directions equally does not move.

Your users will accomplish more, faster, with a product/service tailored specifically to them than if they struggle to apply an overly-generic product to their needs.

Many consultants, developers, and marketers compete to have largest quantity of features instead of competing to be most useful. Don’t believe me? Take a look at software marketing material: all features, rarely translated to benefits. Marketing firms and consultants do the same thing in their own way and call them capabilities lists. Where are the human benefits? That’s the tone of most markets.

“But features are by definition useful!” That’s true insofar as features are functions of a program, or more raw power. But you can hand your users as much raw power as possible and it doesn’t guarantee their ability to use it. Features are useless if they diminish user understanding or success. Does each feature justify the clutter it adds? Does it justify the complexity that compounds across the whole program/package/service? Does it really help your customers accomplish more with the epicenter of your product/service?

We all have our weak moments and throw a little more in for a sake of bulk. But the additional complexity can offset the balance of features to usefulness in a way that is a detriment to our products/services. Even if its just hidden away in your marketing, website, or interface: you’re making navigation/comprehension more complicated at best and you’re steepen-ing the learning curve at worst. Either way you’re presenting a barrier to customer success.

Jason Fried from 37signals explains less as a competitive advantage in software:

“Less Software allows you to distribute your time and energy across less features. More attention to less stuff will make that less stuff better. 100% of your time across 20 things via 100% of your time across 10 things will result in a very strong 10 things. And that’s the kind of software that is satisfying to build, and satisfying to use: simple, focused, useful software that’s really polished. And that’s how you win these days.”

The wise Kathy Sierra calls this “featuritis” and what she writes about it is true (great visual on the post). Featuritis will discourage your users and give your competition an easy way to one-up you.

This isn’t just for software firms. All kinds of products suffer, and all kinds of service business fall in this hole. So why do we get sucked in?

As you specialize your product/service (or change the feature to usefulness ratio), sometimes you are creating a tool that’s increasingly useful to a decreasing number of people (unless you’re specializing to the masses, covered elsewhere). For many entrepreneurs and small/mid-sized businesses, that’s a scary thought—we think about customers in quantity. When you feel the fear creeping in, ask yourself:

• But what about the happier users and the buzz they’ll create?
• What about the people who will pay a premium for the increased quality of your product/service?
• What about the marketing gains that comes from specializing?
• What about the business flexibility from specialization?
• What about the guarantees you can provide to a more specific market and how that persuades risk-averse prospects?