Today we are going to discuss a topic that many of you have asked us about and that we consider is of utmost importance when it comes to being able to be successful on the internet.
A few months ago we were talking about one of the biggest mistakes made by the large mega-structures in the famous dot-com (dotcom) failure, was that they tried to base their business on the number of visits to their website, thinking that having many visitors was enough.
And it didn't matter how they arrived and what type they were, the only important thing was to have thousands, millions of visits and you paid whatever it took to get them, because having those millions of visits, success was guaranteed. This is why millions of euros were invested in advertising campaigns in the most massive mass media, and yet they failed.
That is a mistake, and one of the biggest, and as you already know that I like to do, I am going to explain it with an example so that it is understood once and for all.
Let's imagine that tomorrow at 12 o'clock in the morning, I close the two most important streets of my city and analyze the people there, surely I will find people of all kinds: young, old, elderly, poor, rich, housewives, businessmen, unemployed, retired, Spanish, Colombian, French, German, Argentinian, women, men, homosexuals, heterosexuals, married, single, divorced, common-law couples, white, black, mixed race, Hindu, tall, short, medium-sized… and so I could go on saying countless types of different classifications according to the parameters you want to measure.
Well, let's imagine that I make a tremendous offer to all of them with a 70% discount on a particular product: for example… a Marilin Manson album. How many do you think would be interested? How many would they buy? The majority? 50%? We cannot know, but I guarantee that it would be a minority.
What if my product was a wonderful sewing machine? Would it have more acceptance? What if it were a splendid 3-seater sofa? What if it was some fabulous tap shoes? And an innovative next-generation laptop? AND…? There is no product that would interest 100% of those people, we would always have a more or less small percentage interested, and we would simply be annoying the rest.
Now let's imagine that we could contact all the people in Europe who are talking on the phone, be it landline or mobile, at 12 o'clock noon. Would we have something different from the previous example? Do you think we would get better results? Probably not. What if we did it with all the people in the world who today wear a red garment: a blouse, a tie, some shoes, some panties, some socks… would we have better acceptance with the offers that we have listed before? I am convinced that neither.
Well the conclusion is clear and forceful, we cannot attack mass markets because the majority will never be interested in the same product or service.
So… what is the formula? Very simple, abandon the idea that the more visitors I have, the better and more my sales will be. In return, I propose the idea that we invest our time and money in analyzing the type of client I want to address and from there, developing the products that this type of client needs or is interested in. Sounds weird? I know that a little, but it is the path of success.
This may mean that in many cases we have to manufacture new products with which we have never worked before and even, on some occasions, from sectors with which we had no previous contact.
If at this point, you who are reading, are an entrepreneur who have your traditional business, and want to have an internet business, you should be aware that you may have to abandon the idea that your online business is an extension of your traditional business Well, if you don't know what type of client you are targeting, it is preferable to start from scratch and forget what you do in the conventional world.
What I say, I know that shocks a lot of people and that even when we talked about it in Fénix Media with some clients, they looked at us strange as if we were speaking to them in a different language or we had gone crazy, but later, if we definitely they pay attention, they end up giving us the reason, because when the results arrive on the account… the opinions remain in the fridge.
In other words, you have to define a market niche and study it carefully before investing time in creating products, strategies, promotions and offers that later are useless. But you may be asking what is a market niche? Well, it is a simple question and I am going to give a simple answer: it is a market segment that has characteristics, interests and needs in common. It is not an academic answer, but it is an understandable answer. Not?
I was recently having a conversation with a friend and client to whom I was trying to explain this concept. "And so young people are a niche market?" I was wondering. "Well, yes," I replied, "but it is too big a niche, too wide a niche to be able to cover it all at once and with a single strategy."
"Let's see Juan, how would you eat an elephant?" I asked him to make him think. "I don't know," he replied. "Juan, the only way to eat an elephant is steak by steak." The market is the big elephant and we want to eat small steaks / niches one by one.
Well this is the same, if we close the niche more and more, the number of people we will address will be much less, but the profiles of their interests will be much more defined and we will be able to give them much better what they need and therefore we will have more chance of success. If that market niche is young people between 14 and 24, of a middle or lower middle social class, who live in Madrid and its surroundings, who also study, we will be specifying much more.
The best example is on a sunny day, take some dry straw and a magnifying glass. The first test is to place the magnifying glass 1 meter high between the dry straw and the sun.
Results: none, it is too distant, the light is scattered. Now we are going to lower it to about 70 centimeters, the light is scattered less, but we still have no results. We continue going down little by little and we see how the light is concentrated until a moment comes when the light is concentrated in a defined point. If we keep that distance long enough, we will get the straw to ignite and we will get fire.
And here comes the same question: And if I focus on such a defined market, don't I run the risk that it is so small that there is no business? Yes, indeed it is possible, but there we continue to have the same example of the magnifying glass, because if we go beyond that point that we have commented, and we put it at zero distance, that is, resting on the straw, the light has become out of focus and neither we will make the long-awaited fire. You have to find the balance point.
I personally recommend creating strategies for limited markets and implementing one by one and when we have results in the first one, implement a different one, and so on, rather than focus on a much larger target and never have success or profitability. The choice is personal to each one. I prefer the results.
In fact, at Fénix Media, when a client comes to us to ask us for a quote so that we can make him a web page, the first thing we make him understand is that designing a web for him can be done by many people (his nephew for example) for surely less money, but no one will guarantee the results.
We do not design web pages. We create web solutions.
And what does that mean? Well, the first thing we do is apply an interrogation, a third degree to the client so that he can define what type of client he is targeting, which is that niche for which he wants to develop that page and all the characteristics that he knows of that target, and later we analyze said target in the internet market, to see if there is enough space and to design the structure and the products more interesting than by our experience, and in a few years, they will produce better results.
Summarizing: first we define the type of client we will address, then we analyze the concerns, needs, characteristics, etc. of the chosen profile, later we will define the products to offer them and finally the strategy to implement with their tactics, offers, promotions… etc.
If you already have an offline company and you want to develop it on the internet because you know very well the type of client you are targeting, you already have a hard way, although people do not behave the same in the internet world as outside of it, which is why it is convenient to be advised by a professional, but at least we would already have the niche to work with.
Well friends, you know, the Internet continues to advance, more and more we are all over the world, more and more activities are carried out on the network, and each time people trust more in this medium and buy more in this way, but someone will continue to sell us the things we need. Is it you?
The immediate future belongs to small and medium-sized companies, decide if you want to partake of that cake now.
See you in the next newsletter, I wish you all a lot of success, and don't forget to dream big, don't settle for less.
