Most folks seem afraid of going after a target market. They’re scared that when they eliminate 99% of potential clients to focus everything on that 1% then they’ll end up starving and alone. So, instead of limiting their options, they target “everybody.”

Sadly, there is no such thing as targeting everybody because “targeting everybody” is just a euphemism for targeting nobody. And when you target nobody, that’s exactly what you’ll tend to get. Sure, you’ll get some clients, but only those who can’t conveniently find someone who actually meets their needs — a tenuous USP (Unique Selling Proposition), indeed.

The next great targeting mistake is what I call Deductive Targeting. Deductive Targeting is another form of Nobody-Targeting but with this one you eliminate the least appealing groups. Starting with the obvious ones, the criminally insane for example, you eliminate group after group until you have a target such as “35- to 55-year-olds living in Seattle with an income over $100,000.”

From a strategic perspective, Deductive Targeting sucks. It sucks because in such groups there are no shared needs, no shared relevance. So rather than being just mildly irrelevant to a large group, you’re being aggressively irrelevant to a small group.

If you’re using these targeting strategies, you should be scared. In all liklihood you’ll end up exhausted, confused and broke.

To avoid that unpleasantness, you gotta reverse the whole process.  Start by looking at exactly the kind of person you’d love to work with — hippies, history buffs, high-level professionals, etc, etc — then set to work figuring out what it would take to get them to fall in love with your business.  It’s really not that hard, you just gotta start from the right place.

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