Q: You work with parents who run small home-based businesses. What is the single most damaging marketing mistake you see repeatedly?
A: Defining the audience as everyone who might conceivably buy. A parent selling handmade lunchboxes says her audience is parents of school-age children. That is 4.7 million households in Australia. She cannot reach them all, and trying to means her messaging resonates with nobody specifically.
Why broad targeting backfires
When your message tries to speak to everyone, it ends up written at the lowest common denominator. You avoid specifics because you fear excluding someone. But specifics are exactly what makes a person stop scrolling and think: this is for me.
Q: How should a parent reframe this?
A: Start with the one customer who has already bought from you and told a friend. What problem did they have before finding you? What exact words did they use to describe it? That language belongs in your marketing, not a generic tagline you wrote yourself.
The process that reveals the real audience
Ask three existing customers one question: what were you trying to solve when you found me? Write down their answers verbatim. Patterns emerge within those three responses that no demographic spreadsheet will show you. One parent I interviewed found her real audience was not school parents broadly, it was parents of children with food allergies who felt ignored by mainstream lunchbox brands. Narrowing that far tripled her inquiry rate within six weeks.
Specificity in marketing is not exclusion. It is precision.