A guide to the wedge marketing strategy
How to find your initial niche, and later expand to more audiences & use cases
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It’s time to get specific. Broad and horizontal approaches to marketing no longer work. Maybe they never really did?!
With modern martech (AI, automation, no code tools), your audience now expects personalized, high-value marketing that feels custom built for them. Meaning, early-stage marketing strategies that don’t focus on an acute pain for a specific audience segment will definitely fall flat in 2024.
Given this, we recommend using a wedge marketing approach in the early days, and expanding from this initial niche over time—whether you have a horizontal or vertical product.
This newsletter breaks down:
🧀 How to find your initial wedge
🪤 How to approach marketing with a wedge strategy
(so stoked to have found a relevant use for this mouse trap emoji: 🪤)🥧 How to expand from your initial wedge, and how this differs with horizontal and vertical products
🍽️ How to keep track of all of your audiences once you expand–without spreading yourself too thin
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🧀 What’s a wedge marketing strategy?
We recommend all startups find a wedge to win early users and customers. Even if you have a horizontal product that can serve a broader audience or set of use cases, you need to get specific in your marketing efforts. With a broad approach, your content will fall flat, you’ll spread yourself too thin across channels, and your conversion rates will suffer.
With a wedge marketing strategy, you capture a specific niche (or wedge) first. A niche typically means an audience segment plus use case to start. Once you capture your wedge and are converting prospects from alternative products, services, or processes, you can expand.
To expand, you strategically broaden your reach by capturing more use cases for the same audience (aka land & expand) or by focusing on more audience segments with the same use case(s).
Why a wedge works best
To win the market, you need to find weaknesses in incumbents’ strategies–whether that’s a missing use case or an underserved audience segment. If there is no incumbent, you still need to find acute pain points in the way people currently manage the process, workflow, or problem.
If you’ve truly found a wedge, you can use the first niche to get to the second niche and so on. Meaning, you’ll be able to accelerate growth once you capture the initial wedge.
Founders: Don’t market your pitch deck
Founders often default to starting broad. After all, it’s very tempting for founders to use the same messaging from their investor pitch deck on their website, in marketing assets, and even sales pitches.
What does marketing your pitch deck look like?
You try to target every audience you plan to ever serve right away
You talk about your vision, but no one understands what your product does
You talk about use cases and features you can’t beat your competitors on…yet
This is great for raising money (Big TAM! Big vision!) but is not an effective marketing strategy to gain early traction. Instead, focus on a specific pain point, land with one audience or use case and then expand.
Examples of wedge strategies
Carta - Started with cap table management for founders, expanded to a complete equity management platform for companies and investors.
Toast - Started with booking and reservations software for restaurants, expanded to a complete POS for restaurants and beyond
Stripe - Started with a payments API for developers, expanded to financial infrastructure for the entire internet.
🪤 How a wedge marketing strategy works
Find a wedge: Find audience segments and/or use cases where your product delivers a 10x better experience. Focus most of your marketing efforts on this.
Identify all of your prospects in this wedge: Get as many accounts as possible into your CRM, and systematically try to get in front of them. With a narrowed down TAM and modern tools (like Clay), this is fairly easy.
Become a subject matter expert–or find subject matter experts you can lean on–to create “fuel” (aka content) that’s specific to this audience and use case. That could be templates, no-code tools, or good, old-fashioned thought leadership and enablement content.
Reach your focus audience in targeted ways
Outbound: Send thoughtful, targeted outbound with value-add content that speaks to the specific pain. Outbound typically pairs best with a sales-led GTM motion.
Inbound: With highly-relevant, researched content it’s much easier to attract an audience to your website and convert these visitors. Building an inbound engine works well with a self-serve or PLG GTM motion.
Note: Organic inbound traffic and sign ups can also be helpful for identifying your next segment or use case.Ecosystem: With a niche audience focus, It’s easier to find communities, service providers, integration partners, etc. who have 1:many relationships with your audience. This can work well no matter your GTM motion.
Tailor your website, onboarding, and in-product experience to your wedge this is easier than ever with modern marketing tools like Mutiny, Tofu, Webflow, etc.
Generate landing pages for each audience segment and/or use case
Create onboarding experiences or templates tailored to the audience and/or use case
Build personalized sales enablement materials—you can quickly do this for all target accounts with modern tools.
Expand from your initial wedge—and don’t wait too long: As you're targeting your initial audience segment and use cases, be careful not to get stuck. Without losing focus on your starting point, be planning your next move(s)–which highly depends on if you have a vertical or horizontal product.
Note: Using a wedge strategy, doesn’t necessarily mean you need to turn away other audience segments or certain use cases. In fact, enabling this to happen organically can help you choose subsequent segments to expand to. More on this later.
📏 How “vertical” vs. “horizontal” products impact marketing strategy
People often conflate wedge marketing strategies with vertical and horizontal product strategies. You may think that a wedge strategy only works for a vertical product—as opposed to a horizontal product. We disagree at MKT1!
Whether your startup is building a vertical or horizontal product will have a big impact on the wedge you select to target initially–and how you expand your marketing efforts. As a marketing leader, you may not be able to influence if your product is vertical or horizontal. But you should understand your startup’s product strategy and use that to drive your marketing efforts.
Here’s a break down of vertical vs. horizontal products:
Vertical products are built specifically for a particular industry, role, and/or audience segment. These products are tailored to the (very) specific requirements, jobs-to-be-done, workflows and preferences of that audience segment.
A vertical product feels like a white-glove experience compared to a horizontal product.
The total addressable market (TAM) is often smaller, so you need to make sure you have high enough average contract values (ACV), as you likely won’t have as many customers at scale.
If you don’t find traction with your initial vertical product or audience, it can be very challenging to iterate or pivot from vertical to vertical.
It’s typically easier for all internal teams to stay focused with a vertical product.
It’s easier to follow a marketing wedge strategy with a vertical product—but even with vertical products, often marketing efforts are too broad in early days.
Horizontal products are built for a broader audience, and can be used by a wide range of industries and customer types.
Horizontal products can typically serve a much larger TAM than vertical products.
Successful horizontal products typically have lower ACVs, but more customers.
While there is more optionality and room to pivot with a horizontal product, product teams may be pulled in too many different directions by disparate audiences.
It’s extremely tempting to not follow a marketing wedge strategy with a horizontal product! Fight the urge!
So which product type is better? This truly depends on what problem you are solving. There’s no right or wrong, but the product type impacts not only your product roadmap, but also your marketing strategy–especially as you identify and expand from your initial wedge.
Vertical vs. horizontal product strategies dramatically impact marketing strategy
While we recommend starting with a wedge marketing strategy regardless of your product type, marketing will differ greatly when at startups with vertical vs horizontal products—much like it differs greatly depending on if there’s a self-serve vs. sales-led GTM. I experienced this firsthand when I moved from Ticketfly (very vertical) to Asana (horizontal) to Carta (vertical).
More from MKT1
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including several google sheets templates that help you codify your strategy for each segment, define tiers, and develop positioning.
🧑🚀 Job board: See roles from the MKT community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.
👁️ Related newsletters: Growth marketing strategy, Choosing the right channels, How to run campaigns, and Guide to positioning
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes when it’s time to expand past your initial wedge and how to handle multiple audiences as you scale.