Seth Godin – author of countless bestsellers – argues in his latest book This is Marketing that some online marketing strategies, including SEO, are an illusion.
His idea, in a nutshell, is that it is too difficult to be able to position yourself for generic keywords related to your sector. The so-called “ long tail” keywords, despite being easier to position, do not guarantee sufficient volumes to sustain a business.
How to get out of this situation?
According to Seth Godin, the goal must be only one: to make people search directly for the brand name .
Difficult goal, obviously. To achieve it requires a deep understanding greece phone number library of your audience and a careful and patient strategy, far from the short-term logic typically adopted by companies.
In this article, following the structure of Seth Godin's thought, we will see what are the 3 steps with which a business can reach critical mass .
1 – Identify the Minimum Viable Audience and reach it
The first step a marketer should take is to define “we”. Who is the business for?
Don't fall into the temptation of including everyone, but be brave and define a narrow audience that may be truly interested in your product or service thanks to its particularities.
For example, at Lead Champion, we decided to address a specific market niche, namely marketers or salespeople of B2B companies who spend budgets on traffic acquisition and need to acquire more leads with their website.
This niche is called the Minimum Viable Audience (MVA), a term that recalls the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the Lean Startup. The MVP is in fact the smallest product (a prototype) introduced and validated by the market, the MVA is instead the smallest possible audience from which to begin to validate the strategy.
minimum-viable-audience
Once the MVA has been defined, the early adopters that are part of it must be defined. Early adopters are those people who are constantly looking for something new, among the first to try new solutions. This is the best audience to start with .
This is where advertising comes into play, which can quickly ensure that you reach this user base and get the first feedback.
2 – Crossing the chasm and reaching critical mass
Reaching out to early adopters is also a good move because these people tend to talk about the new products they have tried and spread the idea to other consumers.
Even though early adopters are so open to sharing new solutions, the problem is that the transition from early adopters to critical mass is far from easy.
Geoffrey Moore wrote the famous Crossing the Chasm dealing with this very theme.