What is your Minimum Viable Audience?

In 2017 Seth Godin first coined the term Minimum Viable Audience; as any marketeer will tell you, you can’t sell to everyone you have to define a target audience, yet Seth Godin takes this advice even further posing the question what is the smallest audience you need to achieve your goals?

Consider this -

You invite 4 people to your house for dinner, you want them to have a great time so you go out of your way to find out what they really like, what they don’t like to eat, even the background music and you can create something really special.

Now imagine you are inviting 400 people over, there is no way you can create something that they all love, so you would probably play it safe; chicken maybe and a simple dessert, no one will be wowed but at least they won’t hate it right?

When you create a product for someone you can create something special, when you create something for the masses the best you can hope for is average and we know how much more work and money it takes to market ‘average’ products

What is the smallest number of people you need to delight to achieve your goals?

Looking at your current target audience could you create something really special for just 10% of the audience you described?

Starting with a deliberately small audience means that you need to understand their needs more intimately, to create an offer which meets those needs on a number of different levels, not just the functional ‘jobs to be done’ but addresses the deeper emotional and aspirational needs.

Consider these emotional needs, identified by Bain & Co. How do your customers want to feel (or avoid feeling) because of your product/service?

You can access a toolkithere which takes you step by step through understanding elements of customer value for both B2B and B2C customers, based on the Bain & Co. research

I leave the final words to the author of this concept Seth Godin

“When you have your eyes firmly focused on the minimum viable audience, your quality, your story and your impact will all get better.

And then, ironically enough, the word will spread.”

Defining your own MVA is a key part of your business strategy, if you would like to work on this for your business please get in touch to find out how I can help.

Janet Doran , is a member of the Association of Business Mentors and works as a Business Coach/Mentor supporting small business owners in creative and professional service industries to build and grow their business. To explore us working together on your business please get in touch janet@thepositivepenco.uk

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