[00:00:00] Mia Fileman
Are you tired of empty promises and stolen ideas? Me too. Got Marketing is a podcast for marketers and small brands who want real talk and clever strategies without the BS. Running an online business is hard, but everything gets easier when your marketing starts performing. I'm Mia Feilman, your straight shooting campaign loving friend here to talk marketing, running a business, pop culture, and everything in between. Let's dive in.
[00:00:40]
Many small business owners assume that if they just market better, customers will come. But often the real issue starts long before the website is published and any content is posted to social media. It's about market demand. You can have the best branding, the most compelling messaging, the most creative campaigns, but if there is insufficient demand for what you offer, you are pushing shit uphill.
[00:01:10]
Likewise, you can have pretty average marketing and still be successful. Let me tell you about this cafe in Darwin. It's called the Lime Cafe and it's down in the Darwin waterfront, which is absolutely beautiful. And it is one of the only breakfast-y type cafes down there. Now, the Darwin waterfront is where the cruise ships dock and the people who arrive in Darwin for three hours, they don't look at the Google reviews of Lime Cafe.
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Which, by the way, are awful. Very recently, someone left a review that one of the cafe workers picked up the cheesecake from the cabinet with their hands and put it on a plate. Out of a score of 5, Lime Cafe has 2. 3. And yet, it is still operating 8 years later, while so many other Darwin cafes and restaurants have closed.
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Why? Because it basically has a monopoly on that clientele. If you are the only supplier, then you get all the demand, which is what is happening with Lime Cafe. But if you are just another service provider in an oversaturated market with no compelling or differentiated proposition, You are going to struggle.
[00:02:29]
Why do you think they can get away with charging 6 for bottled water at the airport? Because you have to pay it. You've got no other choice. So this episode, we're going to talk about market demand in detail. And there's two key things that I want to cover today. Insufficient market demand and the competitive landscape.
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So let's dive in. Insufficient market demand is where you do not have enough customers to sustain your business. And the example that instantly comes to mind for me is stock libraries. When was the last time you used an image stock library? Algorithms don't like stock photos. We know that we should be using original content.
[00:03:12]
We have a high-performance camera in our pocket. We don't need a subscription to a stock library. So if you are coming to the market with a stock library in 2025, I am very afraid for you. I had this idea that I would write a marketing book. It's been in the back of my mind for a few years now, but I went into a bookshop, actually several, and I went over to the business section of the bookshop, which is one very small shelf space, like one column, let's call it.
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It's a column. Within that column, Most of the books in the business space are actually personal development and wellness. Within that one column of the bookshelf, there is perhaps one row dedicated to business. So leadership, finance, and marketing. And within that one row, there is one marketing book. So this really changed my perspective about traditional publishing of a marketing book when there is literally one marketing book at any given bookstore.
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So now I'm reframing my thinking and I'm thinking more towards a documentary-style podcast because podcast listening has exploded. Australia is the number one podcasting nation in the world. Even more than Americans, Australians just freaking love a podcast. Traditional publishing in marketing is a very narrow market.
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Fiction dominates bookstores. About 90 percent of a bookstore is fiction. So if your market is too small, no amount of marketing wizardry is going to change that. Maybe people don't buy business books in a traditional bookshop. Maybe they buy them on Amazon. How many marketing books get sold on Amazon?
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These are the questions to ask before you write a single word of this hypothetical book. All right. Number two. The competitive landscape. Now, you might be in a market where there's really high demand for what you offer, but there's also really high supply. And so welcome to your microeconomics lesson. If you are in a market that has established well-resourced players with bigger budgets and existing customer loyalty, you are going to struggle to get traction in that market because they can outspend you a hundred thousand to one.
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So let me illustrate this with an example. Gift hampers. This is a market with a fairly low barrier to entry, right? It's not that hard to put together some beautiful artisanal products from Maggie Beer and Coco Black and Bierenberg and assemble a gift hamper at home and post it to your local area. So this is quite an attractive proposition for someone that wants to run a small business.
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However, have you Googled how many gift hamper companies exist in Australia today? The hamper emporium is the biggest player in the gift hamper market in Australia. And they are running Google ads. They are running Facebook ads and they are outspending you. And often the product is exactly the same. They have Maggie beer, they have beer and Berg jams.
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They have cocoa, black chocolate. So who is the customer going to choose? The hamper emporium who has Google reviews, who has a professionally designed website, who has a team around the clock, who is spending all this money on Google ads, or you sitting at home, just starting this business. So often brands who launch into a highly competitive market have failed to ask these simple questions.
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Can I realistically compete with the players that dominate this market? Is there a market gap that I can own? Is there different products that we can put in a hamper? Because it seems like every hamper is indistinguishable from the next. And can I reposition my offering to attract an underserved audience? Someone that is not being currently looked after by the hamper emporium.
[00:07:33]
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[00:08:29]
I wanna make this easy for you to do practically, so I wanna introduce you to needs based segmentation. I've had enough with traditional segmentation based on demographics and all that jazz. Needs based segmentation basically means that we segment our target audience based on what they need and want, not just who they are, even within the same industry. So needs based segmentation means identifying why customers buy, not just who they are.
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So let's look at an example. Zero alcohol drinks. It's easy to lump everyone together and say, the audience for zero alcohol drinks is those people who are sober curious. But there's actually much more to it. Within the zero alcohol segment, there are going to be people who want zero sugar. We don't want to just replace alcohol with sugar, right?
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That's me, by the way. I don't want to do that. And then within that market, there are going to be people who want a beer alternative that doesn't have alcohol. And there's going to be people, like me, who do not want a zero alcohol beer. So just because you want to create a zero alcohol scotch and five of your friends think that's a good idea does not necessarily mean that there is going to be sufficient demand for that.
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You need to go out and actually quantify it, speak to people and find out if the market for a zero alcohol scotch is fertile enough for you to run a successful business. Your offer should align with actual needs, not just something cool that you want to do. The big swing. Oslo. Is it even a city? This was my favourite marketing campaign from 2024.
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I don't understand why people go swimming in the middle of the city. It's disgusting. You ever been to Istanbul? Also feels more like a village maybe. I mean, you walk around a corner and it's like Oh, there's the prime minister, and you walk around the next corner, and it's like, oh, there's the king. I mean, you could just walk from one side of town to the other in like 30 minutes.
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Try that in New York or Paris. Oslo created a campaign film called Is It Even a City? It was a very ironic and self deprecating campaign about Oslo. The campaign used anti marketing to point out everything that was wrong with the city. Except, what's wrong for one person might actually be right for someone else.
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And that might be exactly what they're looking for. And that was the whole point of the campaign. If you are chasing Paris and New York, and you love crowds and hustle and bustle, then Oslo is not for you. But what if you hate crowds? What if you like being able to get a table at a cafe without a reservation?
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So Oslo used needs based segmentation to create this incredible campaign. And I'm going to link it in the show notes. How can small businesses apply this to their brands? Focus on different needs within your industry, not just on target audience personas and demographics. And sometimes we have to repel the wrong customers.
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I'm going to share some markets with really high demand right now. So if you are listening to this and thinking about starting a business, then these are the ones that are on the up and up low and zero alcohol drinks driven by the sober curious movement, sugar free or functional sodas like kombucha or sodaly is one of my favorite.
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Healthier alternatives to soft drinks. Protein everything. High protein products, bars, shakes, cereals, anything protein is in demand. Content creator gadgets. We are all podcasters and content creators. We need lights, we need microphones, we need all of those things. Sensory clothing and toys. And this is a demand from neurodivergent individuals.
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Bubble tea and novelty drinks. Look, Casuarina Shopping Centre in Darwin, there are shops closing there every single week. But for whatever reason, we have three bubble tea stores. Three. For one shopping centre. For a population of 120, 000. Someone make that make sense to me, please. AI powered productivity tools, automation and workflow solutions, really anything AI.
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Eco friendly and sustainable products. Customers are prepared to pay more for thank you, who gives a crap, zero co, all of that. Pet wellness and specialty pet products. Millennials today are not having children. They're having fur babies and they are treating their fur babies like real babies and they are getting them incredible food and toys.
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And there's even pet hotels, mental wellness and stress management, therapy apps, stress-reducing solutions, remote work, and hybrid work tech. We're all zooming. We're all looming. We're all click-apping. Personalised and biohacking supplements. This is for longevity and sleep optimisation. Electric bikes and micro-mobility, urban-friendly transport.
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Subscription based convenience like meal kits. Nostalgia and retro gaming. Yes, it's a thing. The world is broken right now. We are all really hurting. Shit is getting real. So what do we lean on? Our childhood. Our childhood was glorious. And Nintendo was part of our childhood. Do you see how these things just come in cycles?
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High-performance outdoor gear. We are working more than ever. We have absolutely no leisure time. But if I drop 500 on a North Face jacket, then I'm definitely going to go hiking more, right? Personal cybersecurity and privacy tech. Optus needed this a few years ago, didn't have it. And now we're all a little bit burnt.
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And then finally, regenerative and gut health food, probiotics, prebiotics, digestive health. If your market is booming, marketing is easier. If demand is weak, marketing can only take you so far. That's really the long and short of this episode, friends. Marketing is a force multiplier. It accelerates demand, but it can't create it from scratch.
[00:15:23]
So how do we find out if there is sufficient demand for what you offer? Start with some trend reports like Pinterest predicts is a fantastic resource. If you are in the beauty, fashion, lifestyle space, create a wait list for your product before you actually go and launch it and invest in it and see how many people get on your wait list.
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Create a minimum viable product. Don't go and invest tens of thousands of dollars in building a course, a landing page, running Facebook ads, getting branding for the course. Just get something that is good enough for your first go to test whether this has got legs or not. And then please get on the phone with potential customers and ask them what they want, what they need, and how much they're prepared to pay for it.
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All right, friends, that's a wrap. I look forward to hearing your feedback and your thoughts on this week's episode. I will see you next week.
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Thank you. You listened right up until the end. So why not hit that subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs, and they're also the best way to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia Feilman, on Instagram or LinkedIn, and feel free to send me a message. I'm super friendly.
