How to find a starving market to feed with your product
I used this process to generate $215,000+ from my course
Hello, welcome to this edition! 👋
Here’s a B2B marketing problem to avoid at all costs: selling to a market with low demand.
Most people approach marketing all wrong.
They create a product or service. And then they market it.
And so they fail. Or make not nearly as many sales as they could have if they had first started with the process outlined below 👇
So here’s what you’ll learn in this edition:
How I developed my flagship course to make $215,000
What a “starving market” is and why it’s so important
How to identify starving markets and find a PURE problem
1/How I built my course by analyzing my target market first and identifying their problems, preoccupations, and needs
Since launching my course in April 2024, it made over $215,000 in sales. This is one of my offers among my newsletter, my coachings, and done-for-you strategy. So I consider this course a success as it was my first one.
But this course might have flopped if I hadn’t paid attention to what my audience was telling me they were starving for (i.e., their frustrations of not attracting the right clients with content and feeling it was wasted resources).
To get a clear picture of my audience’s problems, I followed this process:
By posting content, jumping on calls with them, and observing how my audience responded, I discovered:
Their current limitations (regarding content)
Their motivations and objectives
Their problems and pains
Their expectations
This allowed me to test offers tailored to their challenges, as follows:
Which eventually led me to build the Authority-First Content course that teaches B2B marketers how to install a content system into their business that positions them as industry leaders and attracts the right leads.
While everyone else was using the TOFU/MOFU/BOFU approach, I developed a unique methodology called the authority-first framework. This enabled my audience to get the result they wanted, in a way that looked and felt different than anything they’d seen before.
That’s how I created the Authority-First Content’
In this course, I teach you how to create content that attracts your ideal buyers.
Inside, I give you the exact frameworks, templates, and processes I used to bootstrap my business from $0 to $1m in just 14 months through content marketing, and how I built an audience of over 130,000 people.
2/What a “starving market” is and why it’s so important
You can offer the world’s best yoga mats… with the most stylish colors… and the most comfortable, durable materials… But you won’t sell a single thing if your prospects don’t WANT or CARE about yoga, or yoga gear.
And you certainly won’t sell as much as the wellness shop that attracts a “starving market” of yoga fanatics every day.
The biggest reason businesses fail is because people don’t need their product or service. And most of the time, it’s because they created a product they wanted to make, not what their audience actually wanted.
So, if you don’t start a business by creating a product or service… Where do you start?
Start with a starving market.
A starving market is a market of people with a big problem in their lives (or business) willing to pay a lot of money for someone to take away their pain.
So you need to identify a general market but you might have to be more specific. Indeed, broad categories are crowded with multiple competitors AND a category leader.
Find a submarket or ‘sub category’ inside that starving market.
"A sub-market forms part of an overall market, but tends to have some unique operating characteristics. For example, the banking market could be split into the sub-markets of credit cards, home loans, online savings, and so on."
– Segmentation Study Guide
Why should you find a submarket?
Because markets are HUGE. Full of different groups of people with diverse needs, wants, and desires. For example, if your starving market is “businesses”, then the question is “what businesses?” SaaS? Solopreneurs? Mom and Pop shops? E-com brands?
For me it was targeting B2B content marketers who struggle to create content that drives leads and sales. Notice how I said “struggles to”... if they weren’t struggling with content, they wouldn’t be a starving market.
3/Then, identify a PURE problem within this sub-category to build and sell your offer
And here’s a great add from Florian about the PURE problem;
Now let’s get specific. Here’s an example of a PURE problem:
A 3-person sales team is running their sales operations with a spreadsheet. They struggle and need to find a better solution.
Painful: they're wasting time & get overwhelmed
Urgent: they need to fix it in Q1 to hit Q2 targets
Recognized: they realized their setup isn't good
Expensive: they're losing deals because of the mess
If you're selling a CRM; addressing this problem is easy.
Alright that’s the end of this newsletter. I hope it helped you! Thanks for reading :)
Starving crowd, yes. Sub-market, yes.
But all of this is useless if people don't do what you did right at the beginning, the boring stuff, the stuff that looks like you're doing nothing... And that's thinking, ideating, considering.
Good stuff Pierre.
Very Insightful.