Whether your business has just started or you want to improve your marketing strategy, you’ll need accurate information about who is buying or is likely to buy your product or services. Even if you already identified one before, your market can change, or you can spot opportunities for expanding your market, both of which will mean growth for your sales and your company.
Finding and identifying the target market aids in setting the business on the right path. Hopefully, this post will help you will understand what a target market is and why understanding the target market is essential. We will also equip you with different resources to help you market your business, like important questions to ask and what data points are the most important.
What is a target market?
This may be pretty basic for many, but let’s review. A target market is the group of people to whom you intend to sell your products or offer services. Other words used to describe this are target audience or target customer. By understanding their values, behavior, preferences and buying habits, you can position your product or service in a way that will make it highly attractive to this group.
A correctly targeted audience (or multiple audiences) is the key to your business success.
The following are the data points that you need to get an accurate picture of your market and their behavior
- Demographics
- The brands in your industry that they currently use (hopefully yours!)
- The features and benefits of a product and service that are important to them
- How they find products (online? Which sites? What do they type in the search bar to find them?)
- Their preferred mode of communication (email, phone, messaging apps) ;
- Their buying habits (Where they buy, when and how often)
- What factors may stop or hinder them from buying your product or service
Collecting data about your target market
To collect this data, there are many options available to you, such as focus groups. But with 2020 and people practicing social distancing, you may get more mileage out of a survey or online questionnaire.
Surveys are significant since they give tons of data that you can use to define your target market as long as you prepare effective online questionnaires. Map out questions that will get answers that give you the data points above, such as:
- Demographic questions: age, sex, location, profession, etc.
- What is the main frustration with [the services or product you offer?]
- How much are you willing to pay for [your services and products?]
- What social media platforms do you use most often? (Have them rank them, if possible)
- What features about [your product or service] are most important? Lest important (have them rank this if possible)
Let your survey be as short and precise as you can make it. Avoid open-ended questions and offer multiple choices for answers if you can, to make answering quicker and easier for the respondents. A survey that will take longer to complete will make your customer give up the process.
Check the competition
Success doesn’t always have to come from building something from the ground up. There’s nothing wrong with checking out what the competition is doing with their marketing, and figuring out if you can do it better, or cheaper, or faster/more conveniently.
Make sure that you can back up everything you say though. If you don’t live up to your promises you lose your customers’ trust, and losing customers’ trust means losing business.
Check out your competitor landing pages, home pages, product description, and customer reviews on sites like Yelp. Figure out what they’re doing right, and do better, or figure out what they’re having trouble with, and position yourself as a viable alternative to their target market.
Verdict
Finally: remember to revisit your target market at least twice a year- quarterly, if possible. Constantly fine-tuning your targeting can mean more accurate targeting or spotting secondary markets that will allow you to grow. To best serve your clients, you need to know them, and then use that knowledge to propel your company’s sales and success.
