Serve, Don’t Segment
Why I refuse to pick a target audience — and what I do instead.
Every marketing course you will ever take begins in the same place. Narrow down. Pick a niche. Define your ideal customer avatar, give her a name and an age and a set of frustrations, and then speak only to her, forever.
I understand why the advice exists. It is trying to solve a real problem, which is that a message aimed at everybody lands on nobody. That problem is genuine. I just think the solution is wrong, and I think it is wrong in a way that quietly damages small businesses.
Segmentation is scarcity thinking
Here is what segmentation is really saying: there is not enough to go round, so you must ration your attention, and the ration must be decided in advance.
It comes from a world of paid media, where every impression costs money and waste is measurable. If you are spending a hundred thousand pounds on advertising, you had better know precisely who is seeing it. Fair enough.
But you are not doing that. You are writing an email, or a post, or a page on a website, and it costs the same to publish whether four people read it or four hundred. The economics that made segmentation necessary do not apply to you — and yet you have inherited the anxiety that came with them.
So you draw a box, and you stand inside it, and you turn away everyone who does not fit the profile you invented on a Tuesday before you really knew what you were doing.
The recognition model
What I do instead is simpler and, I think, more honest. I do not decide who I am for. I make it as easy as possible for the right people to recognise themselves.
That means being specific about what I believe rather than specific about who I am talking to. It means letting the work, the photography and the client stories do the qualifying, so that someone reading can look at it and think — that is me, that is the situation I am in, that person would understand.
The self-selection happens on their side, not mine. And it is far more accurate than any avatar, because they know things about their situation that I could never have guessed at from a spreadsheet.
What this looks like in practice
It does not mean being vague. Vagueness is the failure mode people fear, and it is a real one — a business that will not say what it stands for in case it excludes someone is not being generous, it is being frightened.
Be specific about the belief. Be specific about the work. Be specific about the kind of problem you find interesting and the kind of person you enjoy sitting across from. Be entirely unspecific about job titles, sectors and company sizes, because none of those things tell you whether someone will be good to work with.
The result is a business that is easy to recognise and impossible to categorise. Which, if you have been reading these in order, is precisely the thing you set out to become.
This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.
