When was the last time you confirmed whom you want to reach with your messaging? Has your business focus and audience changed / expanded / contracted over the past year?
Your business is humming along. You’re meeting your sales goals. You’re following your business plan (or at least what you remember of your business plan). Still, you’ve got this nagging feeling you’re missing something – that there may be even more people who could benefit from your products or services.
Take a lesson from Dr. Christiane Northrup and look at those you’ve identified as your target audience(s). Northrup is a leading authority on women’s health and wellness who has “spent [her] my career helping women get healthy and stay healthy through proper diet, exercise, medicine, and a positive attitude about their bodies.” Realizing that younger girls could also benefit from her wisdom, she and Kristina Tracy wrote Beautiful Girl: Celebrating the Wonders of Your Body. It is the authors’ “hope that this book will be a starting point in a much longer conversation between you and your daughter . . . that will lead to a lifetime of vibrant health and happiness.”
By writing this book, Northrup provided a valuable product for a both a new and existing audience that was in sync with her mission. While she could have continued to focus on women’s health and wellness, Northrup was smart and brave enough to look at her work through a different lens. She was the able to see that she could add a new audience to her business and share her wisdom with young girls. The beauty of this book is that it also helps her existing audience – mothers – talk with their daughters.
Can you take a step back, as Northrup did, to ask the tough questions and identify additional audiences that can benefit from your wisdom?
Very interesting. I love how she used what she was already doing and expanded it by simply looking just beyond her current scope. Definitely worth examining in my business.
Lots to learn from Dr. Northrup – sometimes looking outside of regular scope of work opens up great opportunity.
This is a great example of how you can stay true to your mission and intention and still broaden your reach while keeping your existing audience. And of course, Dr. Northrup is near and dear to my heart as you know. She continues to be a spokeswoman for our times, speaking to both women and girls and providing important teachings about our mind, body and spirit, offering us ways to choose powerfully when it comes to our health and wellbeing. Enjoyed the inspiration in this post, Deb! Very much resonates with the my idea that we can be focused and expansive at the same time.
Exactly, Beverley – no mission creep here!! Like you, I think Dr. Northrup is quite the visionary and love that we can learn a lesson from her and implement changes to grow our businesses while staying true to our cause.
Dr Christiane Northrup truly is a visionary pioneer and an authority in the field of women’s health and wellness. She’s also Oprah’s favourite doctor I believe!
It is impressive the way she has leveraged different demographics to share a universal message. At the end of the day, everyone has an interest in health, regardless of it being directly or indirectly. Young people exist in all areas of life so why not expand your message to include a wider audience. Most importantly, being diverse has not diluted or compromised Dr Christiane’s mission.
Thanks for getting my creative juices flowing to evaluate how I might expand my business to serve a new or different audience. x
Thanks, Michee, for your comments:) Dr. Northrup has found the key to sharing messages around women’s health issues w/o compromising her mission. She’s great at sharing her wisdom to encourage all of us to grow our businesses as well. Look forward to seeing how your business grows!!
After I read your blog, I was thinking about who else can get benefits from my service. My service is focusing on health & fitness for people over 5o years old, but as you mentioned, I might need to take some time to think about who I can add more value in addition to my current audience. Great blog post and think you so much for sharing!
This is a great reminder. So often the pool of audience is much too big and too vague to make a real impression. And if one can whittle it down like Dr. Northrup did, it makes so much sense!
I advise my entrepreneurship students and small business clients to use their personal or professional mission as a decision-making tool. I think it’s the best way to manage your time and priorities effectively while at the same time staying true to your vision. When an opportunity arises, if it will help you to achieve your mission, you can feel more comfortable saying “yes”, whereas when a potential decision doesn’t help achieve your mission, you don’t have to feel obligated to say “yes.” Too many entrepreneurs get themselves stuck on one specific target market and never make the necessary shifts to remain mission-focused. Sometimes your target market, just as anything else in your business, much shift for your mission to be accomplished.
Hi Deb 🙂
Excellent post on knowing who our target audience really is……..I have always had issues with finding mine, but all you really need to do is just figure out what it is you are knowledgeable about and serve those people who relate to your knowledge and share content and resources that will help them 🙂
Thanks for sharing these awesome tips!
Deb, it is really a MUST to adapt your business to grow as your audience does. I struggle with consistency, as I am a Multipotentialite and finding new avenues and audiences excites me. Having a balance of staying the course for your existing client-base, while adding to your repertoire is essential to business growth. Thank you for the great example you present in Dr Northurp, who seems fascinating. Best 🙂
Hi Deb, I love this … this is something that I teach in my small business classes about creating conversations with various audiences for a product or service; going beyond the same Product, Placement, Price and Promotion – to include Partnership & Purpose for the business owners. When things get cloudy or complicated, it’s always best to get back to basics and grow with what you know. Thank you for sharing!