What an Artist Taught Me About Marketing to a Small Audience

1. They know the pain (or need) of their potential customers 
2. They have a product/service that can meet that need 
3. They create awareness about the product 
4. They pay careful attention to customers

Last week I met a professional artist, Borbay, who does things a bit differently. Instead of having a broad inventory of products and mass-marketing to an audience, he does precision marketing.

Maybe he has art whose theme is recycling. If he reads in the newspaper about a hotel owner who just went “green,” Borbay targets the hotel owner and lets the hotel owner know about his recycling-themed art.

While most of us have a product or service and market it far and wide to every living human, Borbay ignores everyone but a specific customer he thinks has the biggest opportunity to buy his art.

This method takes confidence, a deep understanding of your customer, good understanding of your product or service, and paying careful attention to the world around you to find the right buyer at the right time.

Borbay is a solo entrepreneur – he’s not a big company – however, he and Amazon.com are working from the same playbook. Amazon.com excels at showing you “other products” you might want. Recently Jeff Bezos talked about one day “predictive” selling – selling products to customers before they buy them.  

Go “small” and narrow, implement “niche” marketing, and stop targeting as wide a market as you can.

Smart fishermen don’t fish just anywhere – they go where the fish are and reel them in with the right bait – and a dose of patience.

Social media and overall online marketing enable you to more narrowly target the right customer at the right time. Keeping and leveraging a database of your customers enables you to get to know your customers better and offer them more of what they want from you.

You have customers who want to buy from you right now – you must find them and help them find you.