The five letter F word

It’s not a swear word but it’s something to swear by. The five letter F word that I’m referring to is ‘Focus’. Get it, keep it, preach it!

Your business can have the best product or service but without focus it will struggle. We live in a world where everyone has an opinion, where there are more media options that ever before, and seemingly less time. So there’s a constant need to focus on focusing on your target market.

Don’t get distracted by the glitz and glamour, or the price, or how easy something is. If it doesn’t effectively and efficiently deliver to your target market, give it the six letter F word, ‘Forget’.

Here are a couple of practical examples of focus:

• Kitomba, sell software to the salon and spa market. A cool CRM product that among other things also benchmarks staff performance. Talking to the head of Kitomba, I was impressed with his focus on taking this product to other countries. Some might take the opportunity to reskin the product and sell it into other service industries involving regular repeat business

• The arborist in our area sponsors the local school gala. Not a big thing and in many respects it’s quite logical. The gala day is a huge event for the community where not only those involved in the school but others come along to mix, mingle and support the school. So the arborist’s support is well noticed by locals who use his services.

Some products/services have a more defined target market so are easier to maintain customer focus e.g Tinkture (tattoo aftercare product). Whereas others are quite broad e.g. credit cards, utilities, financial services.

Even for those that have a broader customer base there is still the benefit of focusing. Focus on your loyal customers to understand what they like about you. Focus on your not so loyal customers to learn what could be improved. Focus again on certain demographics such as age, gender, income, and also regions, products, channel success.

Prioritise so that you focus on what’s important for your customers. If you don’t someone else will.

Go 2 Market principle: Focus requires that you focus on your target market. Focus on that first, then on delivering what’s going to make a difference.