selecting a niche

Segmentation of a niche by usage

Marketing, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

I keep writing about identifying a Single Target Market.  It all starts by segmenting the market and then breaking it down further till you can reach a level of control on the market which you can Dominate.

Once you start dominating one market, you can move to the next, and next till you dominate the whole segment.

As an example you are the Product Manager for a telephone company which wants to segment the market by coming out with phones targeted at ladies. You can segment this further by either age , rural and urban, by the language options or all of them.

After you have done this level of segmentation you are left with a certain demographic profile combinations. Lets say one of the combinations you decide to choose is a lady, urban, upto 40 years of age, speaks English.

What you do next with the usage could look at this combination and see how many of these are homemakers and how many are working ladies. Now comes the interesting part. In this age group a lot of these ladies could be moms with small kids.

These days kids are smarter than us. So they could end up using their mother’s phone even when it’s locked because they have noticed the password that the mother uses. They then accidentally delete an official email or send an unwanted message accidentally to someone which is embarrassing to the mother later.

As a product manager can you incorporate a feature in the phone where working moms can physically block their phones (like child locks in cars) so that she’s at peace that her child will not be able to make calls or access official emails. You then target this specific usage to go to market. While even other ladies may like this, you’re targeting all your messaging to this segment alone and wanting to dominate it.

Till next time then….think of domination of your market.

Carpe Diem!!!

Diversification is admission of ignorance

B2B, ideal customer, Marketing, messaging, prioritizing, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

A few posts back I had written a post on how giving too many choices actually reduces the chance of success.

I used to hear a lot of gurus in the stock market talk about being focused with not more than 10-15 stocks to get the best returns. If you read the Wealth Creation studies by Raamdeo Aggarwal, he gives a lot of examples of how being focused can give much higher returns. If you want average returns then you can just take an Index ETF.

The other day I was listening to an interview of Garrett Gunderson with Joe Polish on YouTube. And he happened to mention this term in passing and it kind of stuck with me. Garrett has written a very nice book Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying your Prosperity.

Even in marketing if you try to do too many things trying to see which will succeed is because you are not sure of yourself either on your offering or on your market or a whole lot of other things. Most of the time we try to do multiple things at the testing stage to see what sticks and what falls. But once you start seeing what sticks you need to start improving on that. You can’t be testing multiple variables simultaneously. It never works.

You cannot be testing multiple offerings in different markets and also seeing which message works. I have done this at different times and flopped badly. Sometimes these were done because I fell in love with multiple brands and thought I could get them launched at the same time but then eventually realized I could not do justice to all of them. It was definitely my ignorance then. At other times I was in a tight spot and had to somehow get something moving and thought at least if a try so many things simultaneously, I will be able to get success somewhere.

Eventually I have come down to some very specific things for B2B marketing. I need to identify only one target market and niche it as much as possible when I am launching a new product / service. If your segmentation is done well and then you get your database / list based on that you have already come a long way. After that you test your messaging.

The 80/20 that I have been talking about in the last few posts is exactly the opposite of diversification. Its about focus and the knowledge which comes from focus. Like the image above, a few colors in a pattern can give a good look but putting too many colors on the same rug, assuming some one will like some color is ignorance.

Whether its finance or marketing or even other areas of your life you can spread your self, diversify and be shallow and ignorant or go deep, focus and be knowledgeable and get great results.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market – Determining the viability in B2B

B2B, Business, differentiation, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence, segmentation, single target market

I have consistently been harping on the fact that you need to find a niche in the market and a market in the niche. Finding a market in the niche is the critical part in determining if the market is even worth looking at. This is not about prioritizing on the different niches. Its about discarding a niche all together. Please understand that B2B buying is generally not impulsive. Which means you need to play this game over a long term.

For priortising of niches we will have a separate discussion.

Criteria for the B2B segmentation / niche viability

  1. Your average deal size – recurring or one time
  2. Gross Margin
  3. Number of addressable prospects in the niche

Lets look at bundles of 100 or 1000 addressable prospects and I will share a simple model to do a quick calculation of the viability of the market.

Lets say you have a B2B prospect base of 100 and each deal is worth $100000/- per annum recurring. Which means the whole market is worth $10m per year and over a 5 year period if you were to be able to pick up 20 clients you can get a revenue of more than $20m cumulative approx. That’s a good market to be in, because with referrals and other things put together this market may actually end up being very large. Even at a 20% gross margin in 5 years you would make about $4m.

On the other hand if your average size deal was only $1000/- per annum recurring, then the market in 5 years may not be more than $200 thousand. Even if you make 50% gross margins, you will make at the end of 5 years about $100K.

So depending on the size of your average revenue you decide if the size of the niche is viable. The same $1000 product in a niche which has 1000 prospects could be worthwhile over a 5 a year period if you were able to pick up an share of 20% of the clients.

I have found that looking at a bundle of less than 100 tends to be scary because you don’t know how many of the clients will actually move away from their incumbent vendors. From a 100 prospects, Dean Jackson’s inevitability principle will lead to around 20 prospects in 5 years coming your way because some incumbent will make errors and if you are in front of the customer on a regular basis they will end up calling you just because they see you as persistent. A lot of time people don’t have the marketing stamina to last that many years.

Try working with this model and let me know if you found this useful.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Database or list versus message

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, messaging, segmentation, single target market

You know I keep talking about identifying a single Target Market to start with, a single niche in the market with a market in the niche.

One of the key reasons for that is because when you look at a small market then identifying the right people in your market to whom you will give the message becomes easier.

There are a lot of people who would bother about the message and spend a lot of time on tuning the message. My belief however has always been on identifying the right list/database/audience. In B2B if you can identify the right set of people to whom you can be messaging on a regular basis, then you have won half the battle.

To these people even if you were to give an average message, you will get a response. However an excellent message to the wrong audience will get you nowhere.

In my team, whenever a campaign doesn’t work, my first emphasis is always on first getting to identify if the database has been audited for the criteria on which we wanted it. Most expensive failures happen because we keep sending a message to the wrong audience. As Mary Ellen Tribby said “you can’t sell lingerie to a lumberjack”.

In B2B messaging there are multiple people in multiple departments, at multiple levels, who need to be covered with your messaging. Get that piece right for a small audience and then scale and you are on your way to success.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!