Summary
This video discusses a strategic approach to targeting audiences for sales, promotions, or events, emphasizing the challenges and solutions related to reaching potential customers in today’s evolving digital landscape. The speaker introduces a conceptual framework dividing the market into four distinct audience segments—Permission, Identified, Targetable, and Untargetable—and explains their significance in marketing and sales efforts.
Core Concepts
- Market Segmentation:
- Permission: People who actively want to hear from you; they eagerly engage with your content or communications.
- Identified: Individuals whose contact information (email, phone) you have but who are not necessarily eager listeners.
- Targetable: People you do not yet have contact details for but can potentially reach through advertising.
- Untargetable: Those who, intentionally or unintentionally, block or avoid marketing efforts, making them unreachable.
- Audience Distribution (Estimated):
| Segment | Approximate Percentage of Market | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Untargetable | 50-60% | Large portion of the market actively avoiding ads or tracking, making them unreachable. |
| Targetable | Not specified precisely | People who can be reached through paid ads but lack direct contact data. |
| Identified | Very small | People whose information is known but not necessarily interested. |
| Permission | Tiny fraction | Eager, engaged audience actively awaiting your messages and offerings. |
Key Insights
- Untargetable Audience Growth: Despite technological advances and social media proliferation, a significant portion of the population increasingly opts out of advertising and tracking through ad blockers, cookie restrictions, and privacy protections. This cultural shift means the untargetable group is expanding, reducing the overall effectiveness of traditional advertising.
- Advertising as a Necessity for Targetable Audiences: For reaching those outside your permission or identified circles, paid advertising (especially on platforms like Meta/Facebook and Google Ads) is essential. Organic methods such as SEO or reviews rely on the audience’s active search behavior, which may not align with timely sales goals or event promotions.
- Permission as the Most Valuable Asset:
The permission group is where true influence and ease of sales lie. When people eagerly want to hear from you, making sales and promoting events becomes significantly easier and more cost-effective. - Building Permission:
- Understand psychographics (beliefs, mindsets, values) rather than just demographics.
- Differentiate your offering by addressing unmet needs or dissatisfaction within your target audience.
- Deliver consistent, meaningful content that aligns with their desired feelings and values.
- Offer clear ways for people to subscribe, follow, or opt-in to your communications to grow this permission circle.
- Avoiding Pitfalls:
- Creating content just for virality or engagement via clickbait and short attention-grabbing tactics may attract the wrong audience and dilute permission growth.
- Focus on traction with an audience genuinely interested in your message and offerings.
Practical Implications
- Immediate sales goals (e.g., filling event tickets or gaining patients quickly) will often require investing in advertising to convert the targetable audience into buyers.
- Long-term growth and easier sales depend on cultivating the permission audience, which requires a strategic focus on differentiation, alignment with audience values, and delivering meaningful engagement.
- Budget constraints and the shrinking targetable population mean that rapid, large-scale sales without a permission base and sufficient ad spend are unrealistic.
Summary Table: Audience Engagement Strategy
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Identify target audience | Focus on psychographics—beliefs and values, not just demographics. |
| Differentiate offering | Provide something new or better than current market solutions to attract attention. |
| Deliver aligned content | Create meaningful, consistent content that resonates emotionally and intellectually. |
| Grow permission asset | Encourage subscriptions and opt-ins to build an eager, engaged audience for future outreach. |
| Use advertising tactically | Utilize paid ads to reach and convert the targetable audience especially for short-term sales. |
Conclusion
The video underscores the importance of understanding market segmentation and audience accessibility in modern marketing. It highlights that while paid advertising is necessary to reach and convert many potential customers, the ultimate goal should be to build a strong permission-based audience. This permission asset enables easier engagement, reduces reliance on costly ads, and fosters sustained sales success. The speaker emphasizes that this process takes time and consistent strategic effort, and there is no quick fix for immediate large-scale sales without this foundation.
Key takeaway: Focus on building and nurturing a permission-based audience by deeply understanding and serving their psychographics, while leveraging advertising prudently to bridge gaps in reach.
00:00:00
Whenever you need to go out and make sales, whether it’s to get the number of patients that you need, or maybe you’re having an event and you need to sell a certain number of tickets, um it helps to understand this concept, which is I don’t have a name for it, but this is kind of how I understand targeting. So, how do we look at the market? Who is reachable? Who can we get our message, our promotions, um whatever it is that we have to offer? How do we or or how can we get it in front of them? Who can we get it in
00:00:31
front of? And how can we make it easier in the future? How can we work on this thing so that in future events, in future uh promotions and future um offerings, how can you make it easier to reach more people and make more sales? So, that’s what we’ll be looking at today. And the what I want you to um the first thing we’re going to look at is this which is permission identified targetable and unargetable. So this represents the this entire circle represents the entire population of the market or people you
00:01:08
can u people who would be qualified to purchase you whatever it is that that you have to offer. Um so in the middle we have permission. So these are people who want to hear from us. These are people who are um actively listening to um or reading your emails, actively um waiting for your next YouTube video, whatever it is. And then we have identified. So these are people who aren’t actively awaiting your messages, but we’re able to target these people. We’re able to um we have their phone numbers, we have their emails, we
00:01:43
have a way to contact them. So, we’ve identified how we’re going to be able to contact them. These names suck. I haven’t put much thought into the names, but this is the concept that I want you to understand. So, bear with the names. Targetable. So, I said this is like people we can target, but targetable, what I mean is that we don’t have we haven’t identified their information yet. We haven’t identified how we’re going to get in touch with them, but we can target them.
00:02:10
All right? And we’ll look into how we can target them, how we can get outside of the identified zone into the targetable people. And finally, we have the unargetable people. These are the people who are intentionally or unintentionally have created conditions around them that make it very difficult or impossible for us to reach out to them and get in touch with them. And um for the most part, these are people that unfortunately we can’t engage with. And honestly, we should be respecting their wishes. So,
00:02:40
um, this is the makeup of the market, but this isn’t an accurate reflection of what the numbers look like. So, it actually looks more like this, where this is a complete estimation based on um, my experiences and some of the data I’ve looked at. Untargetable will make up around 50% of the population. Uh, maybe around 50 to 60 are going to be unargetable. And yeah, that it’s significant. You would think that in today’s age with technology, with social media and all this stuff, um it would be
00:03:14
very easy to target people. But you have to understand that once social media grew to a certain degree, there was also um the internet is very young. It’s about 30 years old right now. Um the popular internet as we know it. So as that grew to maturity, as social media became coming in in the last 10 or so years, uh maybe 15 or so years, uh there’s been a growing movement to get out of that growing circle. And and not just social media, but the internet in general, advertising, and all this other
00:03:46
stuff. About 52% of Americans right now have some sort of ad blocking. Many people are getting browsers where you just can’t serve cookies. you can’t like do all this tracking on them. Um, a lot of privacy protection. People are opting out of accepting all cookies. Like all these things are we’re we’re fighting this cultural battle where advertisers and people who want to get in touch with you. And then on the other side are the the consumers, the people who want to be respected, who don’t want to have their
00:04:20
attention wasted. And there’s this war going on. And I’m not saying either side is right. But what what you have to understand is that the consumers are winning. They have the ultimate choice. They have their agency to do what they want with their time, their energy. And so this unargetable uh sphere or circle is growing larger and larger. So that’s one thing to keep in mind. Um and that goes to my other thesis of why advertising is becoming very um ineffective, but that’s for another
00:04:49
video. Anyways, so they’re going to make up a huge chunk. And let’s skip over the targetable for now and let’s look at the permission and the identified people. So chances are the number of people who are actively eager to hear from you for whatever it is that you have to promote or offer or whatever is going to be very very tiny. It’s going to be a fraction of a percentage of the entire population. And so and around that the number of people that you’ve identified whether it’s through buying a um a
00:05:22
contact list it’s through like scraping emails or phone numbers or whatever it is that’s going to be identified. It’s also a tiny uh percentage of the available um market. So, we’ll go back to these later on, how to improve these so that next time you won’t have to rely uh on any of this stuff and how we can actually break into the unargetable if they choose to. Um it’s going to be through getting their permission. But, okay, targetable. How do we now target people uh who would
00:05:56
want to purchase or you know what align with your offering or whatever that is? And the answer here, how to break out of this is going to be advertising. That is the only way. Um, of course, there’s things like search, there’s things like um Google reviews and all this other stuff. They work, but the problem with those is that you can’t get their attention at will. So, let’s say you have this event to promote, you have this these sales to make, you have these patients that you need. With
00:06:27
advertising, what you can do is you can spend money. It’s like a pay to win or paytoplay kind of game. If you spend money, you can break out and start targeting people. Uh hopefully that you’re targeting them effectively. Uh but the other stuff like um SEO and all these things, it’s going to be very dependent on the market themselves. It’s going to be depending on them, on their schedule, on their wants, their needs, their whatever season it is. So you have that limitation. So, if you need to make
00:06:57
sales, if you need to get a certain number of events or tickets for an event that’s coming up in two months, which is exactly the situation I’m in, um, and this video is mostly to, uh, help explain to, um, the person who I’m working with why we’re going to have to take this route. When it comes to that, it’s going to be advertising because you’re going to need to pay to get uh, get in front of people. Like that’s the platform’s rules. Like you’re no one is going to be let you do that for free.
00:07:30
Sorry, I’m so nasely. I’m sick right now. But uh okay, so targetable is going to come down to advertising. It’s mostly going to be through meta ads. If you’re looking at Google ads, you’re working with what people are are already um looking for. So there must be a search volume. So if people are searching for it, you’re in luck. you can work with Google ads and most likely you can um create something uh for that and make sales there. Alternatively, if people are searching
00:08:02
for something and you offer an alternative, you can also work with that that way. Um but chances are you’re going to be providing something that people aren’t actively searching for, especially if it’s new, especially if it’s something like a conference. In that case, it’s going to have to be meta. It’s going to have to be display. um people aren’t searching for it and so yeah that’s the platform that you’re going to be mostly working with. All right so now let’s talk about um
00:08:30
permission. I don’t really care about identified. Like you can go you could pay for all these lists. You can um it it will probably blend more with targetable because you can just pay to make the targeted people targetable people identified just as in meta ads. You can pay to um get them onto your website or hopefully get some clicks, get them onto your website and from there serve a cookie, get them identified, build an audience around that and so on. So these two are inter not interchangeable but they uh work
00:08:59
very closely together. Permission is a totally different thing. When someone is actively looking to hear from you, there is something else going on here than you just going out and purchasing or paying for interaction. Right? So permission when you gain permission you can also get people who are unargetable who give you their permission or give you permission to reach out to them. So for example um I do advertising but funny enough I’m blocking all ads like I am uh very analog I’m off um screens for as much as
00:09:38
I can be and so it’s very difficult to get in touch with me. Um even my phone gets very few notifications. I block a lot of it. But there’s a few people who I eagerly look forward to hearing from and for them they they have my permission. And so the goal is to grow this inner circle right here. This circle right here identified. Again, I don’t care so much for um like you can get basically it’s come it it comes down to how to get targetable to being identified, but they’re still
00:10:10
you’re still not breaking into the realm of permission. they’re not actually eager to hear from you. Um, unless you do have a great offering, then they would go from identified to permission. But all right, let’s talk about how do we uh grow permission. And when we can grow permission in the future events, now not only are they identified, but they eagerly want to hear from you. So when when you have to have an event or when you need to make sales, um, if this asset is large enough, you start it
00:10:38
starts to become real easy. So music industries when they hire artists, they’re looking for people whose fan base doesn’t look like this. They’re looking for people whose fan base is mostly permission. And of course, there’s a lot of people who don’t want to be part of it, but like that’s what’s going to be driving ticket sales. So when they book someone famous like Taylor Swift, um her permission circle is massive. And so that’s what we’re going for with you. How do we build
00:11:08
that? So the first thing to understand is who is it that you want to get permission with? Who is the audience that you’re seeking to serve? Not what are their demographics because demographics aren’t how we make decisions. It’s what are their psychoraphics? What do they believe? So if it’s for um a dental office, who are you seeking to serve? What mindsets are you seeking to serve? What belief systems are you seeking to serve? Not with what ethnicity, what income. You can have someone who has a very high
00:11:39
income who is very stingy, right? What not it’s not what age you depending on their age. Um like there’s so many different psych psychographics. There’s so many different belief systems going on. It doesn’t really help you to understand demographics as much as it would help you to understand who or what are the belief systems and the mindsets and the world views of the people that you’re seeking to serve. So first identify that. Then from there you start to well first you have to attract them
00:12:09
right not you’ve identified them but now you have to actually attract them and that’s going to come from differentiation and understanding that of the who like the people that you choose to serve there’s going to be a fraction of them who want something new who want something better who are dissatisfied with the way things are currently done and of those people they’re actively searching they’re looking for something better. How do they find stuff that are better? They look for things that are different
00:12:39
because different means there’s a chance it could be better. If it would look the same, then there’s no chance it can be better. So, differentiation is the fundamental platform from which we attract um new people who are interested in in something better. And so when you can differentiate properly um you understand what it is that they want and you start aligning yourselves in a way for that. And when you align yourselves in a way for that you align in a way where you deliver you understand their feelings
00:13:12
based on their world views what they want and you start serving that. So for me um for example I’m trying to grow my permission asset by by delivering the feelings of clarity delivering the feelings of understanding um whatever it is whatever permission it is that you want for your audience um just start delivering that and offer people to join on like give them a way so that they can subscribe or they can um become a part of it. Um there’s so much I want to talk to about here about like
00:13:48
like on one end you can create content for virality. You can create content for engagement and subscriptions and all this stuff. That’s not the point. We’re creating content for traction. We’re creating content we’re trying to grow your permission asset in a way that it’s only people who would be likely to engage with the behavior that you want them to behave with. Um, and when you can grow it in that way versus just taking the shortcut and making clickbait titles, clickbait thumbnails, um, you
00:14:19
know, like adding in hooks every time, uh, short attention span cuts like that. Yeah, sure you’ll get engagement, but it will be like you’ll miss this like you will be aiming at a totally different circle of people who care about a different thing. Uh because you lost sight of the traction that needs to be built which which is at the center of all this stuff. We want these people to be people who would be actively choosing our decision. All right. Um so let’s summarize. When you need to make sales, when you
00:14:54
need to get a certain number of sales, you have to identify who is unargetable or you don’t have to identify, but you have to understand that people are going to be unargetable. Some people you’re going to have to target through ads. And um here are the people that you can influence. And basically, you need to grow this. You don’t have an infinite budget in order to um capture this entire thing, this entire uh targetable audience. And that targetable audience is also shrinking as our audience um
00:15:25
decides they don’t like ads and there’s more and more technology to support that decision and to support them to be um adree and so this shrinks and so the ultimate solution. The truth is that it’s going to be hard at this po at this moment to get the sales that you want. There is no solution yet. Let’s say you want to wake up tomorrow and get a thousand new sales of whatever it is. It’s just not going to happen because you haven’t built this permission asset and because you don’t
00:15:54
have the budget to access all these people. That’s just the truth. So, how can we improve that? It’s not Well, well, you can you can make more money, sure, but that seems like a very roundabout way. The direct way is going to be to grow the permission asset, right? And to grow the permission asset, it’s going to be identifying who it is that you’re going to serve, differentiating in a way that’s meaningful to them, and then delivering the feelings that they want um little by
00:16:20
little. and showing them that if they subscribe or do whatever, like they can be if if if they join on that they can get closer to their desired feeling, then they’re going to uh give you permission to continue reaching out to them. And when you have this eagerness to to be heard, when people want to hear from you and you can grow that, then whenever it is you have to make a sale or whenever it is that you have an event coming up or maybe you’re touring uh because you’re Taylor Swift and and this
00:16:50
is large enough, then you can wake up the next day, decide you need a thousand units of sales and make it happen because you’ve worked on the permission asset. So, uh hope this makes sense. My head hurts a lot. I’m gonna get some sleep and thanks for watching.