You’re Targeting Everyone, Which Means You’re Reaching No One

Read your top-performing audience out loud. Age range, geography, three interests.

Now say that description to someone outside marketing and watch their face.

You just described several million strangers. That’s the profile underneath your budget, your copy, your channel mix, and every targeting decision you’ve defended in the last six months.

It isn’t a customer. It’s a parameter.

THE PROBLEM: YOU’RE DEFENDING DECISIONS YOU NEVER ACTUALLY MADE

Here’s how this shows up in your week. Your CEO questions the targeting. You explain the logic. They nod, unconvinced, and ask about it again three weeks later.

You’re not losing that argument because your reasoning is weak. You’re losing it because there’s nothing to point at. No moment where the two of you sat down and agreed on who this company is built to serve. So every campaign becomes a judgment call, and judgment calls are the only thing a CEO knows how to second-guess.

I watched this from the inside for years. Jake would say “Chad, go define our ideal customer.” I’d disappear for days. Pull the data, review the calls, find the patterns, build something genuinely good.

He’d look at it and say, “This isn’t it.” Then he’d open a new document and build it himself.

More than once. It was demoralizing, and I was sure the problem was my work.

The problem was that I was answering a leadership question alone and handing over a conclusion. Jake couldn’t see his own thinking in it, so he couldn’t trust it. That’s the Trust Gap in its purest form. Not a communication issue. A definition issue.

THE FRAMEWORK: THE EXTRACTION

The real profile isn’t in your ad platform. It’s in your CEO’s head, in the origin story, in the customers they still name out loud years later.

Extraction is how you get it out. Three questions, plus one that takes nerve.

Question 1: Name five real customers you’d clone. Actual names. The ones who grow, stay, expand, and refer. If you can’t name five, you don’t know your customer yet. That’s the finding, not the failure.

Question 2: What transformation did they actually get? Not what they bought. What became true for them that wasn’t true before. Jake ran this with a costume company that was certain it sold dress-up clothes. What surfaced wasn’t a demographic. It was a mom who wanted to say yes. Yes to imaginative play, yes to wearing the costume to the grocery store, yes without dreading the cleanup or the price tag. They weren’t selling costumes. They were selling machine-washable imagination.

Question 3: What do they share beyond demographics? Belief, stage, ambition, situation. Income bracket and age are the least interesting facts about your best customers.

Then the one nobody wants to run: who is your anti-customer? Who should you never pursue, no matter how eager they are to buy? Who drains the team, churns fast, and costs more to serve than they’re worth?

Defining your best customer is comfortable. Defining who you refuse to serve is not.

THE PROOF

When Jake and I finally put our best clients side by side with our worst, I had to walk into a room and say we were spending 70 percent of our budget on people who would never become our best clients.

We were subsidizing our own frustration.

So we changed the targeting. The website changed. The copy changed. Acquisition volume got worse before it got better, and that was uncomfortable to explain.

But sales got excited, because the leads were closing. Fulfillment got excited, because they were onboarding people they wanted to work with.

None of that happens if I bring Jake a finished profile. It only happened because he was in the room while it took shape.

TAKE THIS AND USE IT MONDAY

🎯 For Marketing Leaders: Pull your top 20 accounts by retention and lifetime value, not deal size. Write down the five you’d clone. Then pull your bottom 20 by churn, refund rate, and support cost. That’s your anti-customer draft. Calculate what percentage of last quarter’s spend went to audiences resembling that second list, and don’t soften the number. Then book 60 minutes with your CEO and bring the two lists and the questions. Bring nothing else. Do not bring a finished profile.

📊 For CEOs: Before that meeting, answer one thing for yourself. Which five customers are genuinely better off because your company exists, and what do they have in common that a spreadsheet can’t capture? Then be in the room for the work, not just the readout. If you weren’t in the room, you won’t trust the output, and that isn’t your marketing leader’s failure.

THE TRUTH

A marketing leader who does this work alone and presents the conclusion is asking their CEO to trust their judgment.

A marketing leader who does it with their CEO is building shared conviction.

One of those conversations ends in a debate. The other ends in a decision.

We put both sides of this on the Indispensable Marketer show this week. Jake’s solo episode walks through the extraction and the anti-customer exercise. The conversation episode is the one where I take it apart on myself, including the year my dashboard was green while the business was bleeding.

Both are on YouTube now. 

— Chad de Lisle Head of Marketing, Disruptive Advertising

P.S. — “Carrie” is a real person. She ran a garage door company, came to our conferences, and referred more business owners than I can count. We still call our perfect customer a Carrie. That’s the bar. Not a segment. A name.