Marketing

Six Vital Steps to Identifying Your Target Market

  • Mark Edwards ·
  • 6 Comments ·
  • May 18, 2018

Maximising sales is an extremely important goal for any company that is interested in making money. The only way to maximise sales is with effective marketing tools and the only way to work out what those are, is concentrating on finding your target market.

It’s not just about identifying who your target market is, either, it’s about identifying what it is that they want and how to give it to them, so that you can increase your bottom line. Many business owners, before they start their company, do as much research about their proposed product and who would want to buy it as possible, so that they can use their marketing budget efficiently.

There are a few good ways that you can identify your target market. Whether you are dealing in plastic surgery marketing or you are trying to figure out the target for your new skin care product, you need to work out where you should be pointing your efforts, or all you would be doing is wasting your cash. The last thing that you need as a new business is to find that you’ve been wasting your budget by throwing money at the wrong group of people. So, with all of that in mind, how can you identify your target customers?

Understanding what problems the customer has is the first thing that you need to do when it comes to working out your target market. Your product or service has to be a solution to a problem, and the problem that your customers are facing has to be fixable – by you, ideally – to warrant your money being spent on it. When you understand the problems that you are solving for your customers, you can work out who your customers are going to be.

The next step is understanding the customers. Your target market is going to have some specifics. For example, if your product was a convenience meal for kids, your marketing is likely to be geared toward mothers on the go; working mothers, especially. They would have the need for convenience in their lives more than most, and that would be your angle. Understanding the different types of customers who would need your product is going to help you to have a good picture of how you can market to them, whether you do that by location, age group or eve industry. Defining your customers is crucial for success.

Once you’ve worked that out, you need your specifics. There will be a specific group of customers having problems that your solution can help. You have to work out who will be at a loss if their problems cannot be solved quickly, so in the case of the convenience meals above, the child will be the one at a loss because you didn’t market your meals to the right area – make sense? Excellent! Always think about stress and emotions when it comes to your target market; a lot of people are emotional buyers and will buy with their feelings.

Do you have a niche market? We live in a world where our adverts online are filtered by our Google searches. Companies are targeting adverts specifically to certain searches online and as we are no longer patient enough to watch daytime TV when there are blessings like Netflix, we tend to be turned off by TV advertisement. So, for the mother who needs convenience meals who is working? You’d need to think about how you can capture her attention if you don’t use the TV to do it. The internet is the best way that you can deliver your product to the right people, especially as our experiences online are all different. Identify your advertising niche and your target market together, and you’ve got the right recipe for success.

Ask yourself what you can offer to customers. You need to be the expert at what you do, and you need to have unique knowledge about what you do to be able to market your product correctly. Once you can establish what expertise you have, you can understand exactly what it is your people need and how you can give it to them. Identifying your niche and your expertise will help you to establish what it is that you can do to be more attractive to your target market, and then they will come to you rather than you chasing for leads.

Lastly, you need to understand your competition. Everyone looking for your product will compare you to someone else. It’s human nature, it’s what we do. When we want to book a vacation, we go straight to the reviews for guidance on whether others found that hotel and location good for the break that you want. Understanding your competition is going to be far more than just checking out their business website. Buy their products or use their service to figure out what they have that differs from your product. You have to figure out how you are unique in your efforts to solve their problem and if you can’t work out what makes you different, you have an entirely new set of problems on your hands. Either you have the wrong product, or you’re not finding the right target market and you are trying to get people who are uninterested in what you have to offer, interested in you.

Marketing is vital to a business, and once you’ve worked out what your market is and how you can advertise appropriately to them, you can start steaming ahead with ideas for doing better for your company. Growing your business and feeding your bottom line with cash is going to help you to fulfil the dream of success that you’ve always wanted to have. There is no need to worry about how to find the customers if you’ve already got your niche down pat. Work hard on your target market before you start approaching investors, and you’ll have the best possible business plan once you do.

Latest Comments
  1. Gita
    • Mark Edwards
  2. Tyler Associates
    • Mark Edwards
  3. David
  4. Lillian