The 80/20 Rule for Your Business
Are you focusing ALL of your marketing efforts on your ideal clients? You know, the ones that are easy to work with and have no problem spending money with you…
If you’re not, you should be.
It might sound crazy, but I am serious when I say ALL of your marketing efforts. Unless you’re a massive corporation with a huge marketing budget, it doesn’t make sense to focus your efforts on anything other than your ideal clients.
How do I know this? It all goes back to a simple concept called the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. This rule states that for MOST events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is a phenomenon found in business, nature, sports, mathematics, and many other areas.
In sales, the 80/20 rule simply means that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. In marketing, it means that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.
So… when we talk about “ideal clients,” we’re really talking about the 20% of your clients that are bringing in 80% of your revenue. Your ideal clients are the 20%!
Once you understand who your ideal clients are—or where your 20% is—you can then do what I love to do… DOUBLE DOWN.
If you’re in the early stages of marketing, you should even take it a step further. Don’t just double down—focus ALL of your marketing efforts on that 20%. If you look at the numbers, this becomes obvious.
By focusing all of your efforts equally across the board, you’re getting 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts. But if you were to give that 20% area TWICE the amount of effort and focus, you could double the results—meaning you’re now getting 160% of your original results from them. Three times the effort? That’s 240% just from that one area…
These numbers aren’t necessarily exact, but you get the idea. The quickest way to grow and increase revenue is to figure out where your 20% lies. In the case of consulting businesses, this means figuring out who your ideal client is and how you can target them.
From there, drop all of your other marketing efforts and hit that 20% as hard as you can. It just doesn’t make sense to focus on getting clients from all different areas when getting ONE ideal client could bring you ten times the results as every other client.
This principle also applies to marketing strategies. If one ad is bringing 80% of your results, you might want to ditch the others and focus only on that one. But the first step is to figure out who your ideal client is… Then, you can start implementing the 80/20 rule in more specific areas.
So… do you know who your ideal client is? And if so, are you focusing all of your efforts on them?
