Market to Everyone, Sell to No One

August 31, 2010

April Dunford had a nice article on her blog “Rocket Watcher” on “Avoiding the #1 Startup Marketing Mistake“, which is “marketing to everyone”. According to her, there are 4 main reasons why start ups should focus their marketing activities on specific targets:

– Targeted Messaging is more effective
– Social Channels work best within community
– By targeting specific segments, there are more opportunities to win and become the leader in those segments
– Success in a specific target builds upon itself

While this is clearly very typical with startups, which are under pressure of establishing some initial customer base and buzz, the same might be said of older companies — from the expansion stage to the later stage — or even after an IPO or exit. Here is another typical situation with a more mature company:

After successfully growing by selling into a particular segment and establishing itself as the leader in that segment, the company raises a lot of venture capital funding and tries to become a “platform”. This is understandable as there is intense pressure to quickly grow and capture the broader market. However, what typically happens is that the company spends a bunch of capital on marketing to everyone, hiring a big marketing department that can do everything from analyst relations, to PR to influence marketing and content marketing.

The company thinks that it needs to think big in order to grow big and compete against the larger, more established competitors in the market. Therefore, it expanded its marketing team and hired marketers who are more suited to large companies. At the same time, it still tries to stay with its roots, and hence the grassroots social media marketers.

A variation of this is when a company tries to define a new product category to differentiate itself from its competitors. With a new product category, the company tries too hard to build buzz and focuses more on creating the new category rather than to sell to any specific target. We have seen this situation backfire on the company as they started to lose their existing customer base while not getting any new prospects signed up, simply because their messaging then becomes too general, “thought leader” like.

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.