How to Identify Your Target Market

Without detailed knowledge of your target market, you could be losing business to your competitors and missing out on opportunities to increase sales.

Whether you sell socks or windmills, you need to understand your customer if you want to maximize your sales.

Ask yourself these questions

Who are you selling to?
Why should they buy your product?
What do they stand to gain?

Look at your existing customers to identify similarities between your regular customers, you can begin to use this information to refine your existing customer base into a target market.

Why do your existing customers choose your business over your competitors?
What are their common characteristics?
What are their  common Interests?

Customers don’t buy products and services – they buy the benefits the products and services produce for them. Customers want solutions.

People will either buy from you or spend their money elsewhere. They need to know why they should buy and what’s in it for them.

Why should they buy your product?
What do they stand to gain?

Once you have a clearer understanding of the problems you solve you can start to work out who is most likely to suffer from these problems and offer solutions.

What problem are you solving?
What is the purpose of what you sell?
What is the benefit to the customer?

When researching target markets, start broad, but become increasingly narrow
eg. you may identify homeowners as a potential demographic BUT when you drill down deeper you discover that homeowners with older children, earning a certain annual income who work in a particular sector are your best customers.

This level of segmentation makes it easier to tailor your messaging to appeal to these individuals rather than a general customer base

Market segmentation can help you understand how your products or services appeal to individuals across several demographics within your target market.

Use these demographics below to help you define your target market by painting a picture of your customer - where are they, who are they, what are their interests and values and what is their buying behavior?

Geographic: Location, Region, Sub-region, Climate, Population

Demographic: Gender, Age, Household size, Marital Status, Occupation, Education, Religion, Race/ethnic group, Language spoken, Children, Age of children

Psychographic: Personality, Values, Attitude, Interests, Lifestyle

Behavioral : Products purchased, Channels products purchased, Rate of usage, Benefits sought,  Method of usage

Working through the all of the above, you should now have a very clear picture of who your target market actually is.
This can be different for different products and services for example one of my clients is a Pilates Instructor with extensive experience in rehabilitation and pain management who runs classes for horse riders as well as community classes. She has a different target market for each of these separate services.

Use this checklist on all your market segments and build your very targeted marketing strategy around it.

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If you would like to talk about your business or your target market simply contact me anytime, happy to answer any questions or meet for a coffee