I've coached over 100 solopreneurs in the past 17 months. Those struggling to scale their revenue often times have this problem → a "bad" target audience.

It's not that they haven't specified a target audience. It's that the target audience they selected didn't enable them to scale their business.

Here's an example of what I mean:

In late 2022 I started working with a career coach in the data analytics space.

He had a strong following of 7,000 people, plenty of trust, a good newsletter and a valuable coaching offer.

But he was making less than $1,500 per month and was stuck at his 9-5 job.

The problem wasn't his content. Getting leads was routine. The problem wasn't his coaching program. Everyone that bought got great results.

The problem was 99% of his target audience didn't value premium, paid services — and in most cases couldn't afford them. Every time he would pitch his coaching or bring it up in direct messages, people would come right out and say they didn't have the money for it....

To solve this problem, we shifted his entire business model from career coaching to data consulting. With a brand new target audience now focused on selling to companies instead of consumers.

He has now increased his revenue, signed a contract with one of the largest data firms in the U.S.A, and he makes — no joke — 18 times what he was making previously. 18x income in one year 🤯

Yes, we did develop a new offer. But the more important thing was we targeted a new audience that checked all 3 of these boxes:

1 | Adequate Purchasing Power

Your target audience should have plenty of cash on hand to buy whatever you're selling.

Using another career coach example, if you target senior directors you'll have a much easier time over targeting entry level accountants.

A new college grad has a negative net worth. Even if they want to hire you, unless they have parents ready to foot the bill, you're going to have a rough time making the sale. Trying to help someone "break into their career" is difficult.

Meanwhile, the senior director with a $250,000 salary isn't going to think hard about paying you a few grand to help them land their dream job...

Pick an audience and craft your messaging for those that have spending power.

2 | Urgent Problem

The number 1 thing that will drive sales is urgency to fix a problem.

A classic example to explain this phenomenon is the vitamin vs painkiller analogy.

Vitamin = nice to have.

Painkiller = must have.

If you go to the doctor and they say you need to start taking a vitamin D tablet so you can better absorb calcium, you might do it, some days. But since there's no urgent problem you'll skip some days of taking that tablet.

If you have back pain + a kidney stone that won't go away without fluids and time... Your doctor will prescribe you some interim opioids. And you're gonna pay for that prescription regardless of the price and take it every chance you can.

Your job as a business owner is to target the problem that requires the opioid. Not the Vitamin D. 

3 | Easy To Find And Contact

Your "niche" — or rather — person to contact to start the sales process, should be easy to identify. 

Think CMO in a specific industry. Or a type of coach located in a specific country. 

These people will have their job descriptions on their website on their social media profiles. If you can't quickly identify the decision maker you need to contact, you've overcomplicated your target audience.

TL;DR for my skimmers

An effective target audience includes these 3 traits:

1. Plenty of spending power

2. An urgent problem

3. Easy to identify

If you're constantly battling price objections or budgets that don't fit your service — consider changing your audience before anything else.

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