Just before I began working for SmartDraw I worked as a consultant who specialized in building online marketing solutions.
One time when I began working with a new client I sat him down at our first meeting and asked him “who are your customers?” He told me “anyone who is willing to buy what I have to sell.” Immediately I concluded that this client would need a better definition of his target market if he had any interest in actually selling anything.
I wish I could have sent him our most recent Working Smarter article, “Working Smarter with Market Focus Diagrams.”
The premise of the article is that you can use market focus diagrams, more commonly referred to as Venn diagrams, to help you identify a specific target market within the context of larger, broader markets.
The market focus diagram is useful for quickly explaining who your target market is to members of your organization, investors, or potential partners. However, it’s really the process of creating the diagram which benefits small business owners and managers.
Venn Diagrams Aren’t Obvious, Contrary to Popular Belief
Venn diagrams are a simple concept but not an obvious one.
The first step to understanding the value of a Venn Diagram is understanding the significance of the sizes of the circles.
As you probably know a Venn diagram is meant to illustrate the commonalities between different groups. A market focus diagram is a specific application of a Venn diagram meant to show overlaps between different groups of customers.
In our SmartDraw example, we defined SmartDraw’s broad “target market” in our unique selling proposition as “Office Users.”
We start with the circle which represents all Microsoft Office users:
This circle is going to be largest given that it’s the broadest definition of our target market. Most of our potential customers will be contained inside this group.
The next group that we want to add into our market focus diagrams is “managers” – people who manage something, whether it’s people, projects, or operations.
Notice that while both groups mostly overlap, some managers fall outside the purview of “Microsoft Office Users.” This is something that we thought about when we were going through the process of determining SmartDraw’s target market: do all managers use Office?
Naturally, there are some who don’t and they are not our ideal customers because chances are that if they do not own Office then they will not be interested in SmartDraw either.
As the SmartDraw marketing team pondered our ideal target market some more, we determined that there was another important group of people who need our software: presenters. We defined presenters as “anyone who has to invest significant resources into preparing presentations on a regular basis.” So we added them to our market focus diagram:
There are more managers than there are presenters, thus the “presenters” group is smaller than the “managers” group. However, there are still a large number of managers who have to make formal presentations to their supervisors, investors, or customers, thus there is a decent amount of overlap between the two groups.
And this is our ideal target market – “managers who use Microsoft Office to prepare presentations.” The process of drawing a market focus diagram makes it easy to spell out a relatively specific target market like the one I just provided.
Learn More about Market Focus Diagrams
If you'd like to see how to draw a market focus diagram, please view our screencast "Find Your Target Market with SmartDraw."
Also, if you'd like to try SmartDraw, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.
