Fried Egg Marketing® is all about focusing on the yolk. Because let’s be honest: it’s the best part of a fried egg; gooey, runny, and perfect for dipping your toast into. And in your marketing, that’s the market sector you need to target: your best-fit customers.
The yolk is the most important segment of your audience—the prospects most likely to convert, and who closely match the profile of your best customers.
I came up with this metaphor about a decade ago. And honestly, I believe that it’s an easy way to explain and understand the importance of Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in marketing and sales. You can learn more about that here.
Scrambled eggs are exactly that: scrambled. And scrambled marketing is the last thing you need if you’re chasing sales. After all, they’re already illusive enough as it is.
Just like scrambling eggs mixes everything up without distinction, this approach to marketing leads to an untargeted (and probably ineffective) marketing strategy that can result in wasted budget and abysmal ROI. It’s throwing eggs at the wall and hoping they’ll stick.
Which is… not a great way to do things.
Omelettes are the opposite of scrambled eggs: they incorporate multiple flavours, trying to appeal to everyone at once. So, there’s strategic thinking there, but it results in marketing which ultimately has a poor return on investment due to its lack of targeting.
The core message often gets lost among the flavours and your messaging doesn’t really resonate with anyone. Which hampers your ability to sell to the people you help the most. Learn more about Omelette Marketing here.
I find it tough to get that nice runny yolk when I boil eggs. I know I know—there are numerous tools designed to ensure you get it right every time, but sometimes those fail me too.
The same is true for Hard-Boiled Marketing: its rigidity and lack of forgiveness means you’re never quite targeting the people you want in the way you want.
Then, we turn to the fried egg. The King of Eggs.
The yolk, that golden centre, is your most valuable customers: your ICP. The white represents the broader market around those ideal prospects, which is important, but not critical right now. If you draw them in, great! But they shouldn’t be taking precedence over your yolk.
Fried Egg Marketing, then, emphasises focusing your resources on the yolk—marketing efforts are then highly targeted, and directly align with the core of your market.
Let’s dive a little deeper into how the two parts of the fried egg work together.
Your ICP is about pinpointing who your “super fans” are. These are the customers who benefit the most from your product or service and are typically the most likely to convert. You’re good at selling to them, so you’ve got to get good at marketing to them, too.
Once you’ve got your ICP in place, you can begin to break down your buyer personas. This will aid in your content creation efforts, so you’re properly focusing on the problems faced by those in your ICP. But that’s a topic for another blog post…
The egg whites here are not useless. After all, in an egg you need the whites to support the yolk! It’s about structural integrity. Guess what? Your marketing needs the same structure.
There are two parts to your egg whites:
Now, the background is all well and good, but how does this all help? After all, no one wants to put tonnes of effort into something that doesn’t work in the end.
Here are the key benefits of adopting a fried egg strategy:
It’s a commonly-cited figure that 50% of marketing budgets are wasted – the accuracy of this figure aside, the point of Fried Egg Marketing is to ensure that your marketing efforts are concentrated.
By not diluting the message—as is often required when you’re dealing with a broad audience—you’re better placed to make every pound of your marketing budget work harder. In turn, every new prospect should have a lower cost of acquisition.
With content targeted at the right people, you can make said content more appealing to them specifically. If you know your ICP’s broad pain points, you can develop your content marketing strategy to meet them where they are. This is part of ‘buyer enablement’, which Fried Egg Marketing is adjacent to, making it easier for your target buyers to buy from you!
Looking back at those egg whites… wouldn’t it be nice to be able to target those a bit too? They’re not your perfect fits, but they’re pretty darn close.
Once you’ve built strategies for your yolk, you can adapt and scale them to start targeting some of the whites. Now, this shouldn’t become your sole priority, but with enough leeway in budgets, you could branch out whilst you continue to generate leads from your yolk!
Having customers to whom your marketing, and the product itself, is hyper-targeted fosters an environment wherein you’re best placed to respond to their needs after onboarding.
Customers who have positive experiences are more likely to share their positive experiences more widely—by word-of-mouth or on the likes of LinkedIn, or review websites. Their referrals can in turn become a valuable source of revenue!
Fried Egg Marketing is not designed to replace your existing marketing strategy—it’s meant to help you enhance it.
By concentrating on the 'yolk'—your most valuable customer segment—you ensure that every marketing effort is optimised for impact and efficiency. This targeted approach not only helps you to win better business, but also makes it easier for you to turn customers into advocates for your brand while reducing marketing waste.
Get started on cracking the code to finding your ideal clients with Fried Egg Marketing. Book your place on our Fried Egg Marketing webinar.