Both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett declared that the ability to focus was key to their success.

Focus is also a key to success in marketing, but it is less about your focus and more about your customer’s.

Every buyer, be they consumers or business buyers, has a focus. We all filter, and with the multitude of media options and an endless stream of marketing messages flooding them, people are creating more and better filters daily. Much has been written about getting “above the noise” just so you can be heard, and it is not unsound advice. However, it misses the sweeter approach of quietly standing directly in the field of your buyer’s focus.

Take your standard IT geek (please). They tend to be insanely focused, driven by technical prowess, to dig deeply into a topic for days on end. Coders can program for 24 or more hours provided there is an ample supply of Diet Coke. The intensity of their focus is beyond the comprehension of people with lives. Now imagine if you had a product suitable to IT geeks, related to precisely what they are focused on today, and you could put it in front of them at the moment of greatest focus. Let say you could magically put a database accelerator package in front of a DBA while he was attempting to understand the inner-workings of his data base management system.

You would have his complete attention, not rising above the noise but by being his only thought.

Such magical moments are very rare, but it illustrates the point. It is more important to be precise than loud. It is more profitable to be in the middle of their focus than to buy banner ads on every remotely relevant web site. It is better to time your email blasts to when the buyer is focused on the topic than when your message appears as a distraction.

In B2B marketing, you can attempt to attach your product to the buyers’ core focus, the waves of collateral interest they ride, or through indirect attachment. Let’s revive our DBA for a moment. His core focus is the database technology he manages and how it works. If your product isn’t part of their core technology, then you cannot be squarely in his field of focus. But if it is, then you need to reach him when he is most actively thinking about the database, namely during business hours and preferably in the late morning when he is fully engaged and not yet burnt to a mental crisp.

Yet our DBA has related interest tied to his database of choice, and there are waves of collateral interest – optimization, enhancements, support disasters, nifty tricks. You can attach your product to his slightly swayed focus, but your pitch has to be tied to the temporary topic. When such tangents are not available, you are left with associating indirectly – by whatever DBAs are universally interested in. It is not out of the question to buy ad space in a MMOGs (massive multiplayer online games for the non-geeks).

Focus on where your buyers focus and they cannot help but notice you.