One very common pet peeve among marketing professionals is hearing business owners say that they serve everyone. It doesn’t bother us that it is impossible, even though it is. Business owners also know that it’s impossible, and they don’t truly mean everyone in the world. What they do mean is that they want to attract anyone and everyone who might possibly be interested in working with them. And that is the part that bothers us.
If you say that you serve everyone, then you don’t have an effective marketing strategy. It’s categorically impossible to reach your potential “everyone” with the finite resources at your disposal. This bothers those of us who do marketing for a living because we know that business owners who can’t define their target client are wasting money and harming their own profitability.
When we challenge potential clients or networking contacts about the “I serve everyone” fallacy, they always want to know why they absolutely have to narrow down their audience. I’m more than happy to share those reasons. Whether or not someone becomes my client, I want to help business owners see the value of marketing to a specific audience and leverage their resources in a more profitable manner.
Reason 1 - No One Has the Capacity to Serve Everyone
Even though no one literally means everyone when they say that’s who they serve, they do tend to mean they’ll take every client who comes their way. If that is your philosophy, and it comes to fruition, you are going to run into a capacity problem.
Even if you narrow down your focus to serving everyone in a geographic location, or everyone in a certain industry, you will potentially end up with far more clients than you can handle. Unless you have the ability and resources to scale up your staff and production abilities as soon as all those clients are ready to sign on the dotted line, you run the risk of taking on too much. Maybe you have considered that, and you’re putting resources in place to handle all those new clients. But how many of those clients are completely wrong for you? We’ll get to that in the next reason, below.
Business owners who run with this strategy of casting a very wide net and landing more clients than they can adequately serve tend to run in a constant cycle of feast and famine. When they have too many clients, they pull back on marketing. They need to stop the flow entirely while they work through their overbooked schedule. But they are so busy that they forget to restart their ads, go back to networking meetings, and renew other marketing efforts before they reach the end of their client load. They enter a slow period and have to start it all over again.
This cycle is exhausting and inefficient, yet many small businesses continue to go through it. Aside from the inconsistent revenue, and possibly inconsistent work quality, there is a huge downside in general work satisfaction. By taking on every client, you will end up with a lot of clients who are not the best fit. This can lead to burnout, difficult client interactions, and less passion for your work. These issues lead to my second reason why you don’t want to serve everyone.
Reason 2 - You Don’t Actually Want to Work with Everyone
When you market to everyone, you will inevitably take on a lot of clients who are not compatible with you. Two people or entities can be incompatible for all kinds of reasons:
Different values in business or in life
Different styles of conduct, speaking tone, and formality
Different priorities and standards
Different interpretations of what the scope of work will entail
Most of the time, differences between two people or businesses aren’t good or bad. They simply exist. And not all differences equal incompatibility. Sometimes those differences offset each other in a really productive way. For example, a highly organized bookkeeper might be the best fit for a contractor who operates in total chaos but is fully committed to keeping the balance sheet in order so he can bring on a partner. If the contractor didn’t care about accurate financials, and actually preferred to hide money, that difference would make for an incompatible relationship with the bookkeeper.
When a client is truly incompatible, you can usually tell early in the process. There are always clues near the beginning of the relationship that working with this client will be difficult. But if you serve everyone, you don’t have a concrete reason to decline the work. Without much more than a gut instinct, you feel compelled to move forward.
By taking on clients that are not a good fit because there is no reason to say no, you risk missing out on several clients who would be a good fit.
Recalling the feast or famine scenario I mentioned, this is incredibly stressful when your roster is overfull with headache clients, and it’s demoralizing when they make up the very few clients you have in a slow period.
Business owners who narrow down their definition of who they serve are far more likely to attract compatible clients who inspire them to do great work. Despite the risk of working with clients who make them miserable, business owners will still say they need to market to everyone so that they don’t miss any opportunities. The reality is that you already are missing those opportunities, which leads me to the third reason that you can’t serve everyone.
Reason 3 - Marketing Efforts to Everyone are Diluted and Wasteful
Think for a moment about how much marketing you filter out in a day. You know that you are not the right audience for every product and service out there, so you naturally ignore anything that doesn’t apply to you. When you are the right audience for a company, hopefully their messaging stands out and is instantly attractive to you. Everything else is noise.
If you use extremely generic marketing tactics in order to appeal to everyone, your messaging is going to add to the noise.
This can become very expensive if you’re spending your advertising budget on materials that will be heavily diluted by all the other noise out there.
When you take the time to narrow down your real target audience by building a persona, you will also get much more clear and focused in your message. Then you can use your budget effectively to concentrate on the right people.
Middle Ground Between Everyone and Just One
Once people hear my full rationale for why they should not market to everyone, the next fear is that they have to drill down on just one single ideal client.
Developing your ideal client persona doesn’t mean there is only one person you can serve. It means that all the clients you have capacity to serve will fit that persona type.
Most business owners will not narrow all the way down to one client type. Usually, you are looking for a few target audiences. You might have anywhere between 2 and 5 ideal client types, and you might not develop them all at once. You will need different messaging for each persona, so you might start with one or two and add more as you gain time and resources. You will create a profile for every ideal client and then develop marketing materials and campaigns that appeal directly to them. An example might be a kitchen remodeling company that wants to target young families buying fixer uppers, empty nesters who want to make things more accessible, and house flippers. Very different messaging will speak to each of those client types, so the company needs to determine how to allocate their budget into the right marketing for persona.
When I talk about working on a persona, I don’t just mean demographic information. Remember that you want to work with compatible clients, so we will be implementing activities that attract the right client in terms of personality, values, standards, and work ethic. Think about the very different client types the kitchen remodeler wants to work with. There is probably a common thread that will make specific people from each category the best fit for that contractor.
When You Don’t Work with Everyone, You Can Work with the Right Ones
Your ideal clients do exist, and they would love to choose you over a competitor if you can capture their attention. But the only way to capture their attention is to stop trying to capture everyone’s attention.
Marketing professionals know very well that when our clients stop chasing everyone and really start working on their messaging to attract the right clients, they enjoy their work more and are more profitable.
If you have been trying to serve everyone, or even if you know you can’t but you don’t know how to narrow down to the ideal client, reach out to me for a discovery call. I start with the basics so that we can get crystal clear on your target audience and the messaging that will bring them your way.
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