It seems simple: the more people you market to the more customers you’ll get. But this isn’t always true.

In order to appeal to more people, you’ll need to change your products and services to meet everyone’s needs. And you know what they say: when you try to please everyone you end up pleasing no one.

Plus, marketing to a broad audience costs a lot of money. So, even if you do find more customers you’ll use more resources doing it, which will hurt other areas of your business.

A better strategy is to find your minimum viable audience—the people who will most benefit from what you’re offering—and create products and marketing campaigns that appeal to them. If you build something they love they’ll spread the word for you.

Here at Leadpages, we’ve spent a lot of time identifying our minimum viable audience to differentiate ourselves from our competition. Here are a few tips we’ve picked up along the way.

Choose your niche

Let’s say you want to help entrepreneurs launch their businesses. That’s great, but there are many different types of entrepreneurs with a variety of unique needs.

So in order to find your minimum viable audience, you’re going to need to niche down. Instead of targeting all entrepreneurs, you could gear your business towards:

• Women who want to start a blog
• Minorities trying to launch their first business
• SaaS developers
• Entrepreneurs who want to pitch their business to venture capitalists

By choosing a specific niche like the ones above, not only are you more likely to appeal to that specific audience, but you’ll become an expert in that field and will be able to offer more relevant expertise.

Get to know your audience

Once you have your niche, you need to figure out who it is you’re marketing to.

To do this, ask yourself some questions about your prospective audience:

• What are their demographics (age, gender, race, occupation, etc.)
• What are their psychographics (behaviours, interests)
• What are their goals
• What are their challenges

By answering these and other questions you should be able to develop a profile of your ideal customer.

Create your audience’s dream product

Based on the profile you develop you can start creating new products and services (or adapting existing ones) to meet your audience’s unique needs.

This means that instead of trying to find customers for your business you’re building a business for your customers.

You can also utilize the information you’ve gathered on your audience to create marketing campaigns just for them. This often leads to higher conversion rates and a much better ROI.

Ignore those that say “this isn’t for me”

There will be those that might not do business with you because your offerings aren’t geared toward them. They may even voice their displeasure over this.

Don’t let it get to you.

If you start making sacrifices to appeal to these people there will be others that want you to make changes for them as well. And then before you know it your brand will lose what makes it special.

Instead, keep focusing on your ideal customer and satisfying their needs within your ability to deliver. Those are the people who will become lifelong customers and advocates for your brand.

Your minimum viable audience is out there and they’re waiting for a product that’s designed just for them.

Go make it happen!