Find The Right Audience. Craft The Right Message. Problem Solved

Scenario: A technology company that was seeing declining sales and needed to find a new go-to-market strategy with a fresh approach. The goal was to reinvent the company and find a relatively untapped market - a blue ocean strategy.

Ensuring success in an untapped market involves mastering three things. Knowing the audience, this might include the obvious groups that we are aware of but also those who can use this product or service that have traditionally never used it. Once you know the audience and the ideal personas you have to know what their pain points are and how your service can move them from that place of pain to a better place of joy. This leads to the message, that ‘gap’ between pain and joy is essentially the message we want to put into words. If this is done well then the message will resonate and hit home with the target personas. The last thing is knowing the best way to get this message to the ideal audience. Doing this without steps one and two is a waste of money but when the first two steps are done well this step becomes the critical component in exploiting an untapped market. 

I had the opportunity to experience this at a company called Stratus Technologies, they had traditionally been a hardware provider, selling fault-tolerant servers - these are servers that never fail due to their fail-over capabilities to a new system. They were used in mission-critical situations like 911 call centers or oil rigs. If the operations failed they would either see the loss of life or great financial loss. As the world changed however they made an unsuccessful play in the cloud market, the key to their success was a physical product, but their product was large, clunky, and expensive, not what the modern business wanted. They developed a small robust product called ztC Edge that could survive in dirty, dusty conditions like an oil rig, factory floor, or extreme temperatures. This small device offered internal storage coupled with a cloud option. The internal storage was used to process critical data and cut down on latency then the cloud option could access large amounts of data when needed but with longer latency times. 

This new untapped market opened new doors, but the company still had to walk through them. Knowing exactly who could benefit from this audience and knowing how this would make their lives better, save them money, and improve their operations. From here my team and I were able to find the most effective channels to serve this message to the right people at the right companies. This campaign is still in play today and reaping benefits with the right audiences.