“Who are you selling to?”
“Everyone!”
“Who is a good customer for our business?”
“Everyone!”
Right? Wrong.
Effective sales and marketing require you to be precise in your targeting. Without a focus strategy to guide your efforts, meaningful results are unattainable.
The idea of a focus strategy first originated with Michael Porter, an author and academic from Harvard Business School. He defined core strategies for a business to achieve above-average performance in a specific industry. Porter believed a company needed to define their scope or the parameters for where they would target prospective clients.
Companies have two choices: They can choose an industry-wide scope, offering products and services across many market segments, or they can choose a focus scope, offering products only to selected segments of the market. Porter said that a focus strategy relies on the choice of a narrow, competitive scope within an industry.
Now, for some national brands, say Coca-Cola or Whirlpool, it makes sense to have an industry-wide scope. These brands truly sell to customers across the country. Other brands, particularly small businesses, will not find success from taking this industry-wide approach. If you are looking to break into the Cleveland market, it’s important to drill down into some more targeted segments rather than market with a wide net!
This comes back to that familiar adage, “If you try to be everything to everyone, you accomplish being nothing to anyone.” If you spend time researching your existing clientele or past customers, you will probably begin to identify some commonalities among them – this may include company size, demographic, location, and other details. As you sift through this information, you will begin to define your target market segment. Why not focus your energies and marketing dollars on these prospects?
A focus strategy requires you to think carefully about your ideal customers. We believe the more narrow your funnel, the more precise your targeting, the more return on investment you will see from your marketing efforts.
A SWOT analysis weighs the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that pertain to your business. Opportunities and threats are great benchmarks to understand where your business can grow and what obstacles you’ll need to overcome. This can help you target locations, markets, and customers that you should be paying attention to, helping you focus your business plans. Thinking about what internal and external factors are going to impact your business can help you focus your marketing efforts in a more impactful, targeted way.
Michael Porter determined the five forces that shape the way your business will run and how you should be marketing your business. Those five forces are:
Understanding these forces can help you understand how viable your product is and can also help you find places to market. You might find that you’ve got the only solution in Milwaukee, and it would be better to focus your attention on that market versus Cleveland.
Now you know your SWOT position and the forces that are going to impact your success, so it’s time to put them side by side and see how you can build a strategy based on what you found out. Using your analysis, ask yourself these questions:
When you start answering these questions, you start to understand the importance of Porter’s assessments of your company versus the market. You’ll start to understand why marketing to everyone at once is ineffective versus the targeted audience you’re establishing.
S.M.A.R.T. goals are designed to help you focus on goals that are easy to understand and attainable, and they are designed in a way to foster a clear and mutual understanding of what constitutes expected levels of performance and successful professional development. S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for goals that are:
In digital marketing, these metrics are vital, because you can track how different calls to actions and conversion methods are working based on the goals you are looking to attain. With S.M.A.R.T. goals in place, you can set goals that make sense when matched up to the data you are privy to with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
You’ve got goals, but do they match up for your long-term success as well as your short-term profitability? The Five Forces will help you understand things like the return you will get on your investment with marketing the products and services you offer, while the SWOT analysis lets you know if you are in a position to make the products and services tangible. Meshing the two with some S.M.A.R.T. goals gives you the data you need to decide how to move forward to hit your sales goals as well as your organizational benchmarks.
This is just a brief overview of what focus strategy is and how to put it to use. Why is a digital marketing company talking about all of this? It’s simple. If you put together ads, websites, social media posts, etc., but you don’t take the time to develop your strategy and goals, you’ve just wasted your time and completely missed the objective. At Company 119, we begin with the end in mind, and that means we visualize success first and then work backwards to determine how we get there and what success means for each campaign. Let’s talk about your company, your goals, and your services and products to develop a focus strategy that will help you achieve your business vision!
