Here’s something obvious to a business owner: that each of your customers spend a different total amount on your products or services in a year. A customer on retainer for your service contributes more to your bottom line than someone who needs a one-time fix, for example.

A familiar way that this is recognized is through the 80/20 Pareto principle. This states that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the resources. Or that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your customers. So it’s easy to understand trying to focus on your small sect of heavy buyers, but this is a mistake. 

In his all-time great book How Brands Grow, The renowned marketer Byron Sharp states, “...growth comes from extraordinary acquisition.” 

According to Sharp, we should concentrate on the other 80% of buyers because A. there are so many of them and B. their current buying habits don’t perfectly represent their future sales potential.

Although most of us don’t have our products being sold all over the globe, Sharp uses Coca-cola as an example as to why brands need to focus on small buyers. He states that most of their advertising is not aimed at customers who drink multiple cokes a day. Instead, the advertising is aimed at people who rarely buy coke. 

Say we are the rare buyer. If we do not see a piece of Coke marketing, the odds of us neglecting our semi-annual purchase goes up. Now, seeing a Coke ad doesn’t make us instantly want a soda either. It only slightly increases our rare chances of buying a Coke from say 1/300 to 2/300--an improvement easy to overlook. 

But if everyone in this rare buyer category is exposed to Coke ads in as many markets as possible, this increases all of our likelihoods of buying one soda from 1/300 to 2/300 (1/150). The purchase frequency of this large group has now doubled!

Another reason to not focus all of your marketing efforts on your largest buyers is that specific testing periods could recategorize your buyers. One quarter might result in a few heavy buyers buying less. Or less frequent buyers finding more reasons to return to the store. 

In short, life is too dynamic to only focus on today’s big buyers. 

A few of my former bosses realized this. They wanted to have some sort of social media presence, even though their largest customers would never interact with them through social media. They did it just to be available to any customers on the platform. They did the same for Google Reviews: in their line of work, they don’t often have everyday customers coming into their store. But they still want to maintain their impression amongst that buyer category. 

And I was in charge of all of that 😎.

If you’re looking for ways to draw attention from specific categories of buyers through social media or any other online tactics, please click the button below to fill out a contact form.