Marketing Targeting: It’s Not Just Where You Fish, It’s What You Put on the Hook

Back in the day I was taught that marketers do three things, memorized via the acronym STP:  segment, target, position.

• Divide the audience into different segments.  For example, dividing consumers by demographics or dividing businesses by size or industry.
• Select the segments that the company wishes to target for its marketing.  For example, choosing small and medium businesses (SMB) as your target segment.
• Position the product in the mind of the consumer, ideally in a unique way, providing differentiation and/or benefit [1].  For example, positioning your offering for the SMB segment as easy to deploy and inexpensive to own.

I’ve always thought of targeting as the answer to the question, “what list do I want to buy?”  Do I want buy a list of marketing directors at SMBs or a list of chief data officers (CDOs) at Fortune 1000 companies?

The list-buying metaphor extends nicely to events (what shows do these people attend), PR (what publications do they read), AR (to which influencers do they listen), some forms of digital advertising (e.g., LinkedIn where you have considerable targeting control), if not Google (where you don’t [2]).

For many people, that’s where the targeting discussion ends.  When most people think of targeting they think of where on the lake they want to fish.

While an angler would never forget this, marketers too often miss that what you put on the hook matters, too.  Fishing in the same part of the lake, an angler might put on crayfish for largemouth bass, worms for rainbow trout, or stinkbait for catfish.

It’s not just about to whom you tell the message; it’s about what you tell them — the bait, if you will, that you put on the hook.

Perhaps this is too metaphorical, so let’s take an example — imagine we sell financial planning and budgeting software to businesses and our target segment is small businesses between $0M to $50M in revenue.  Via some marketing channels we can communicate only to people in this segment, but through a lot of other important channels (e.g., Google Ads, SEO, content marketing), we cannot.  So we need to rely not only on our targeting, but our message, to control who we bring into the lead funnel.

Consider these two messages:

• Plan faster and more efficiently with OurTool
• End the misery and mistakes of planning on Excel

The first message pitches a generic benefit of a planning system and is likely to attract many different types of fish.  The second message specifically addresses the pains of planning on Excel.  Who plans on Excel?  Well, smaller businesses primarily [3].  So the message itself helps us filter for the kind of companies we want to attract.

Now, let’s pretend we’re targeting large enterprises, instead.  Consider these two messages.

• End the misery and mistakes of planning on Excel
• Integrate your sales and financial planning

The first message, as discussed above, is going to catch a lot of small fish.  The second message is about a problem that only larger organizations face — small companies are just trying to get a budget done, whereas larger ones are trying to get a more holistic view.  The second message far better attracts the enterprise target that you want.  As would, for example, a message about the pain and expense of budgeting on Hyperion.

I’ll close in noting that marketers who measure themselves [4] by the number of fish they catch — as opposed to the conversion of those fish into customers — will often resist the more focused message as you won’t set attendance records with the more selective bait.  So, as you perform you targeting, always remember three things:

1. It’s about where you put the boat
2. It’s also about the bait you put on the hook
3. It’s about catching customers, not just catching any fish.

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Notes

[1] The decision to emphasize differentiation or benefit is covered in The Two Archetypal Marketing Messages:  “Bags Fly Free” and “Soup is Good Food.”

[2] In a B2B sense, at least.

[3] Amazingly, a lot of large and very large businesses also plan on Excel, but let’s not confuse the exception for the rule or the point of the example — different messages attract different buyers.

[4] Either literally by putting KPIs on high-funnel metrics such as MQLs or, more subtly and more dangerously, by getting too much inner joy from high-funnel metrics (“look how many people came to our webinar!”)

[5] Ending on a spectacular mixed metaphor!

(Cross-posted @ Kellblog)