Marketing becomes more impactful when the business has a clear understanding of its Smallest Viable Market and creates Brand Advocates within it.
The Smallest Viable Market is a tightly targeted group or niche of prospects who have a need that your product or service can solve, and they are willing to pay for it.
The size of the Smallest Viable Market is determined by calculating the minimum number of customers the business needs to achieve and sustain its objectives.
Would your business be sustainable if you had 50 clients each paying you $100,000 each year? Can you identify 50 clients who could become your Advocates
The Smallest Viable Market forces you to choose who you want us a customer and create something specific for them, rather than offering something to the world in the hope someone will bump into it and buy it.
For SME businesses, it is far more achievable to meaningfully connect with and effectively sell to a small number of potential Advocates rather than aim your messages at of thousands of disconnected prospects and hope some will buy from you.
The smaller the market the deeper the understanding of your audience you can achieve. This enables you to create a solution - and marketing - that is tailored to their specific needs and desires, so you can serve them exceptionally well. This, in turn, makes it more likely that they will be interested in what you have to offer and that they will be willing to pay for it and recommend it to others, as Brand Advocates do.
The larger the target market, the more likely you need to generalise your product or service - and your marketing - so that average people or businesses may like it. The objective is to make better solutions for a niche market, rather than an average solution for masses of people.
Two things often occur when a business delights their market:
- They discover it's a lot larger group than expected
- They are more likely tell the others
This is all about being specific. It has nothing to do with scale and everything to do with being really clear about why you do what you do, who is it for and what is it for and setting a standard for producing work that people connect to and are changed by.
