Is your campaign a loaded gun with no aim?

Over a decade ago I performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and our troupe of high-energy young women received a scathing review I’ve never quite forgiven: “Like a loaded gun with no aim.”

At the time, I thought they just didn’t "get" us. And honestly? I still think that. We were leaping around in tights to Destiny’s Child; why on earth did we invite a famous classical theatre reviewer to that? But that was exactly the problem brands live and breathe today.

We wanted EVERYONE to be our audience. “The more reviews we get, the more people will come to the show”. We weren’t actually speaking to the person in the room who was about to go away and tell the world their opinion of us.

I've sat in enough planning meetings to know how this goes. Someone asks "who's the audience?" and the answer comes back something like "decision-makers in mid-market companies who care about efficiency." That's not an audience.

You cannot address all markets, and the moment you try, you stop being effective. I know what you’re thinking “we know this”. But do you? Or, most importantly, does your marketing team, aligned with your sales team, put it into practice?

The brands that grow fastest aren't the ones with the biggest reach. They're the ones who know exactly which segments they're for, and just as importantly, who they're not for.

Here's how I think about it, in three layers.

Target Market

This is the broad group of customers, B2B or B2C, who have a high-priority problem your product solves. Note the word "high-priority." Not a problem they'd vaguely like to solve one day. A problem that's actively costing them time, money, or sleep.

Most teams skip this step or define it too loosely. "Furniture retailers" isn't a target market. "Independent retailers in Western Europe doing under £5m in revenue who are losing margin to Ikea" is. The specificity is what makes every downstream decision easier, from messaging to channel mix to pricing.

Target Personas

If the target market is the macro view, personas are the human view.

The personas that work are the ones built from real conversations with real customers, not internal workshops where everyone projects their own assumptions. A persona should tell you what podcasts they listen to, who they trust, what they Google at 11pm when something's gone wrong. If yours doesn't, it's not finished.

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

This is the one I see B2B teams get wrong most often, usually by treating it as a synonym for "target market."

Your ICP is the specific type of company that brings the most value to you and to whom you bring the most value. The mutual part matters. An ICP is "companies who'll buy from us, succeed with us, renew, expand and tell their peers."

A good ICP has teeth. It tells you which deals to chase and, harder, which ones to walk away from. If your ICP doesn't help you say no to revenue, it's not specific enough.

Why this all matters

When you skip this work, you end up with shotgun marketing. A loaded gun with no aim.

Lots of activity, lots of impressions, very little compounding. You're paying to reach people who will never buy and confusing the people who might.

Don’t be a loaded gun with no aim, trust me.