How to Market a Product That Can Help a Massive Audience

The question I’m answering here: basically my client’s got a product that will benefit everybody, but obviously if you market to everybody you win nobody.  That’s pretty much across the board with marketing.

I’m going to recommend a book for you to read.  Specifically, what I’m getting ready to tell you is just straight out of the pages of this book.  I’m not going to give it to you yet, because I don’t want everybody Googling for the book, I want you to listen.  Once I share with you the answer, then you can read the book and get all 300 pages of information from the horse’s mouth.

Generally, the process is: if you want to go mainstream with something, you’ve got to find one part of the market that can be the part of the market that just loves you and tells everybody about you.

If you market to everybody in the market, let’s just say for example that you’ve got something that enhances people’s eyesight.  Everybody could use something that enhances people’s eyesight.  If you were to market to everybody, you would market to nobody.  If you market to women who have children, you would say “Hey, the reason that you should get this is you would be able to see your children playing in the field across the way, and you would be able to see them more clearly.”

If you market it to older people then you might say “If you use this device then it will allow you to read without stretching your arm 24 feet.”  Then if you market to young children who are starting to wear glasses you might say to them “You can use this and people won’t laugh at you at school.”
The marketing message to every part of the market is going to be different.  If you try to market to everybody, nobody is going to want it.  What you do is you choose one segment of the market, and then you just really start to market to those people.

There’s 2 ways to choose that, of course the book I’m going to recommend will probably give you 10, I’m going to tell you 2.

One way to choose it is to say, I’m going to market this to women from the ages of 30 to 40.  If you want to do that, then you go out and you say okay, what web sites appeal to women between the ages of 30 and 40?  You go out and do some demographic research, and you find out which websites have those kinds of people on them.  Then you go advertise.

Then you say, “Sean, didn’t you say don’t advertise?”

Yeah, I did. That’s what I’m saying, this is one option here, and I just want to give you here as an option.
The other thing is to say “Who are the people who really need what you have?” You’ve mentioned a group of people who really need what you have.  Let’s say people who have had their identity stolen.  I don’t know what the number is, like a million people a year in the United States have their identity stolen.  You’ve got a ready-made market of a million people that are searching for an answer. They’re googling “how to fix my identity,” or whatever the case is.  I don’t know what the websites are, but if you go google “how to fix my identity,” you will find the top 10 websites in the world for that particular problem, and you can begin to enter the conversation stream.  You can write articles on that kind of thing and then people will start googling and finding your articles.

There’s this idea that says you build the website and then tell everybody that you know about it, and then people who need what it is will begin to come to the surface.  I haven’t given you an exact marketing mechanism for you, because I think that’s a later step for you.  Right now you’ve got to kind of decide, okay, what exactly is going to be that one part that you’re going to come to.

Here’s what I’m going to recommend, I’m going to give you the book, I’m going to recommend that you read the book.  I recommend that you do all the work to apply what the book says to your business.  Figure out exactly which is going to be the market that you go with first.  Then perhaps in a future Q&A, once you’re able to tell me all of that, then I can help you get to the next step.

The book is called Crossing the Chasm, and I’m going to assume that the 3rd edition is the latest one.  So, Crossing the Chasm 3rd edition by Geoffrey Moore.

The title is deceptive and I think the original edition was Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. I think it should really be called Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Mass items to Mainstream Customers and it teaches you how to get to that point.

It is in some sense a dry and dull and boring book.  In terms of reading.  It’ll put you to sleep.

But!

The message, and some of what’s in it is old, outdated, you’ve just got to look through that stuff.  The message in it is the best in the world for figuring out what you’re talking about right now, right here.

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Mass items to Mainstream Customers 3rd edition, by Geoffrey Moore.
That’s your homework for now.