There has never been a more important time in the history of business to have a well-defined target market. You cannot afford to target every customer. However, smaller businesses can effectively compete with larger companies by targeting a specific niche market.
Many businesses will have targets defined as “homeowners” “stay-at-home moms” or as “anyone that is interested in my products”. These are quite wide nets and are too general to catch the right customers.
Targeting a specified cross-section of the market does not mean that you exclude people that don’t fit in with your specified niche. Targeting instead allows you to focus when your spending on the people who are most likely to buy your products or use your services.
With a well-defined target audience, it is far easier to determine how and where your business should be marketed.
In this article, we’ll share some tips that will allow you to define your target market
Look At Your Existing Customer Base
Work out who your current customers are? Why are they buying from you? Look for anything that all of your customers have in common? Which of these common traits and interests brings you the most of your business?
Check Out Your Competition
Who are the competition targeting in their marketing and who are their customers? You should find a different market to target if possible. There may be a market that they are missing out on.
Find Specific Demographics To Target
Customer segmentation is an important aspect of targeted marketing. Figure out who has the need for your product or service as well as who is most likely to buy it. Think about factors such as age, gender, location, income, education, marital status, occupation, ethnicity.
Think Of Psychographics To Target
Psychographics include things like personality type, values, interests, lifestyles, behavior, and attitude.
Testing Your Target Market
Once you have decided on who your target market is, you should think about the following points;
- Are there enough people that will fit the criteria?
- Can my target market afford the products or services?
- Do I fully understand what drives my target market?
- Will the target market benefit from my products and services?
- How can I reach my target market?
If you have more than one target market, your marketing message should be different for every market. If you can reach both of your targets with one message then you may have broken your niche down too far.
How To Find The Information You Need?
If you want to find information about your target market, do some searching online to see whether others have researched your target market already.
Look for blogs or magazines that are targetted toward your market. You may also want to consider carrying out a survey of your own. You could also interview your existing customers.
Once you have defined your target market, the hard part is done. It will be much easier following this to figure out how you can reach your market and what message you will use to capture their attention.
- DISCLOSURE – This post has been written by an outside source
