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You are not your target market Part 3

By Becky McCray

My speaker ribbons from #TACVB. @sheilas picked them out.

The same experience that makes you valuable, makes you no longer like your target market.

You are not your target market: You know too much.  

You’re pretty smart. You’ve been around your industry or subject area for several years, maybe longer. You have studied, learned, tried, failed, learned some more, succeeded, and learned some more. In short, you are no longer the same as your customers.

Now, this is good because you have something to teach them. Now, this is also bad, because you don’t know what it’s like to be a beginner anymore. You think you remember, but that is tempered by looking back through your own experiences. Your customers are at the other end of the experience. They are looking ahead, but can’t see very far. It’s not really possible for you to really understand that anymore, because you know too much.

So you have to listen, deeply, to the questions customers ask. You have to think, deeply, about the questions they aren’t asking.

See also: 
You are not your target market Part 1: Quit hanging around with your own people. Go find the customers.

You are not your target market Part 2: What you like doesn’t equate into what customers like.

You are not your target market: How to get more volunteer participation.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
  • Downtown is your town’s core: How to make your case - February 22, 2021
  • Zoom Towns: attracting and supporting remote workers in rural small towns - December 10, 2020
  • In an economic crisis, spend your brainpower before your dollars - November 25, 2020
  • Video: How to fill empty car dealership buildings for the holidays - November 6, 2020
  • How has 2020 changed the challenges rural small towns face? Tell us here - October 20, 2020
  • The Idea Friendly Method to surviving a business crisis - October 6, 2020
  • Join me for the Rural Renewal Symposium online Oct 13 - September 26, 2020
  • Cheap placemaking idea: instant murals - September 11, 2020
  • Refilling the rural business pipeline - July 7, 2020
  • Huge vacant buildings: grants to renovate? - June 9, 2020

November 28, 2011 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, marketing Tagged With: service businesses

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Comments

  1. Agatha @Free Money Tips says

    November 29, 2011 at 12:11 am

    After 10 years in the accounting biz, I had a hard time figuring out what it was my target audience actually wanted to learn about money. Surveying friends and current customers has helped. And doing speeches for various types of groups has also helped me narrow my target market and what they want to know.

  2. Wayne McEvilly says

    December 3, 2011 at 10:24 pm

    Becky:
    This is really very applicable in a general perspective – I think it even applies to the way we welcome (or not) newbies on Twitter. I can vividly remember what it was like being in that place. So I attempt “to listen, deeply,” as you say and to make my communications suited to the circumstance. This also applies in a big way to bringing the forbidding field (to many) of “classical music” into a public arena where many feel unwelcome or uncomfortable (because of so many reasons, one of them being the cult of exclusion that has so surrounded it like a barbed wire fence :-)
    Well, useful post. Thank you.
    Wayne

  3. Becky McCray says

    December 3, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    Yes! Wayne, I think you are very, very good at this.

Trackbacks

  1. Why You CANT put your feet in the shoes of your customer - Carbonview Research, Inc. says:
    August 13, 2013 at 11:43 am

    […] Becky McCray from the Small Biz Survival Blog for inspiring this article. Read her series called, You are not your target market. Check out her blog for more insights and experiences from a small town business […]

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