If Everyone Is Your Customer, No One Is
Who is your target customer?
“Everyone.”
Excellent.
Men, women, teenagers, retirees, CEOs, students, homeowners, renters and apparently anyone possessing a pulse and a credit card.
That should make the media plan nice and simple.
Businesses naturally want the largest possible market. Why exclude potential customers?
Because trying to appeal to everybody usually produces marketing that means very little to anybody.
Here are five reasons “everyone” isn’t a particularly useful target market.
1. Different customers want different things
Imagine selling accounting software.
A freelancer might care about saving time. A small business owner may want easier bookkeeping. A CFO could care about integrations, reporting and control.
Same product.
Completely different reasons to buy it.
Segmentation helps you identify those differences instead of producing one magnificent message about “innovative solutions for all your needs.”
2. Generic audiences create generic advertising
When you’re speaking to everyone, what exactly do you say?
Your product is reliable. Affordable. High quality. Customer-focused.
Wonderful.
So is apparently every other company on the internet.
Knowing your audience lets you talk about specific problems, outcomes and objections that actually matter to them.
3. More reach isn’t necessarily better reach
Reaching 100,000 people sounds considerably more impressive than reaching 10,000.
Until you discover that 90,000 of them were never realistic customers.
Marketing isn’t a competition to expose your logo to the largest number of humans possible.
The goal is to reach enough of the right people to produce a business result.
4. Segmentation improves the entire funnel
Your audience decision affects far more than ad targeting.
It influences your offer, creative, landing page, content, email follow-up and even what Sales says when someone becomes a lead.
That’s why your marketing channels need to work together.
The clearer the customer segment, the easier it becomes to create a consistent journey around what that customer actually needs.
5. Narrowing your target doesn’t mean rejecting everyone else
This is where businesses sometimes panic.
“But someone outside our target audience might buy!”
Of course they might.
Defining a target market doesn’t require installing security at checkout to prevent unauthorized customer segments from purchasing.
It simply means deciding who your marketing is primarily designed to persuade.
Other customers are still welcome.
The takeaway
Segmentation isn’t about making your potential market as small as possible.
It’s about recognizing that different groups have different needs, motivations and reasons to buy.
You can understand those differences, prioritize the most valuable opportunities and build marketing around them.
Or you can target everyone.
Create generic ads.
Send everyone to the same page.
Give everyone the same message.
And wonder why nobody seems particularly interested.
If everyone is your customer, no one is.
Because “everyone” isn’t a target market.
It’s what you say when you haven’t decided who matters most.