Having narrowed your market, creating the key message will be much simpler. You will not have a number of different market segments with different priorities vying for the key message. This is a good thing.
It should be relatively simple to decide what is the key pain point you are solving. More difficult may be couching your solution in a way that is provocative and exciting. This is critical. It isn’t sufficient to have a solution that is “as good as everyone else’s” or “is an interesting twist on established solutions”. You are looking for a solution that causes your audience to say “wow, thank you for solving that problem” or run off and tell others about what they found. Remember that people like to be “in the know”. They like to inform. They like the praise of having helped someone else. People love to be able to tell someone they found something that is relevant and will make a difference in the other person’s life. It makes them feel good. That is the essence of what you need.
Let me give you an example of what it is not. I used to be VP Marketing for a company called PhotoAccess. We were an early web service for hosting and sharing digital photos. We were revolutionary at the time. Since then there have been many new comers to the game. Recently I ran across a company that had just raised some serious angel money for a new photo sharing web site. The site is nice, easy to use and frankly on par with a number of other sites. The uniqueness they felt they were bringing to the table was the integration of blogging with photo sharing. The problem with their offering is that there are dozens of web sites that let people create stories around their photos including Facebook, Myspace, Myfamily, Famspam, WordPress and many others. They feel they have a better balance of both and that it is simpler than other implementations. This is a great example of a service that people will find, many will use, and probably nobody will talk about because frankly there is nothing compelling to talk about.
Can you see a person saying “you wouldn’t believe what I found! There is a web site where I can post photos and write stories around them that is really easy to use”? It isn’t news and nobody will care. Just ain’t gonna happen.
So, make sure that you can spin your solution into something that raises the bar and changes the game in a way that is newsworthy so that you gain the viral marketing you need to get you off the ground.
