How your business can find its target market

Being able to define a target market is a vital part of a marketing campaign. A target market guides your marketing strategy. It tells you where you’re going to advertise and when. It gives you insight into who’s buying your product or service. It’s your niche.

You want to uncover this niche so you can create specialized content that resonates and, in turn, your product or service will be top of mind with your target market.

What is a target market?

It’s a defined group of people, businesses or organizations your company is trying to reach with its marketing. These are the people who are most likely willing to buy your product or service.

Your target market is not everyone!

In today’s diversified world, there’s no way to make everyone your target market. But that’s okay! Don’t be afraid to select an extremely specialized group as your target market. Your product or service can still be bought by people outside of that specialized group. Your target market contains the people who are most likely to become leads and sales.

However, selecting that specialized group isn’t easy, so here are some tips on defining a target market for your business.

Understand what your product or service does

What makes companies like Apple and Google so successful? Both of those companies understand exactly what benefits their products give to their consumers.

Now, your company may not be selling a product that can be used by everyone in the general population, like Apple and Google. But there’s still something to be learned by their examples.

Successful companies know their products and how they can directly benefit the people they’re selling to. If you have people who don’t understand your product, how are you going to expect

them to be able to market or sell it to someone?

One way for your marketers and salespeople to fully understand your product is to have them go out in the field. When your marketers and salespeople are in the field, they can interact with customers. By doing this, they can learn about the product firsthand and learn who your current customers are.

Look at who your current customers are

One simple way to start defining your target market is to look at who is currently buying your product or service.

According to BIA/Kelsey, 61 percent of small-to-medium businesses report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers. Because repeat customers are such a large revenue stream, it’s crucial to understand who they are and market your offering toward them.

You can pool some basic information on your customers to get an idea of the kind of person who falls into your target market. These can be things like age, gender and geographic location.

Another way to understand your current consumers is by using website metrics. There are many tools that help marketers understand the consumers who visit their website. The most common tool is Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can compile data on the people who are visiting your website. Things like age, gender, location and what device people use when visiting your website are tracked for you.

Look at your competitors

More than likely, your product or service isn’t the only option out there for consumers. Looking at your competitors can give you extremely valuable insight into how other brands are positioning themselves in the market.

One way to find this information is by looking at your competitors’ social media presence. You can see what kind of voice they use in their posts, what kind of pictures they post and how often and when they post. From there, you can draw conclusions on who your competitor is targeting.

You shouldn’t copy what your competitors do, but you can use this information to gather ideas on who you should be targeting and how they should be spoken to.

Keep an eye out for your competitors in the news, using a tool such as Google Alerts allows you to track mentions to them. You can find out where they’re putting paid content and figure out what the target audience of those outlets are.

Build a customer profile

The final step you should do when locating your business’ target market is to build a customer profile.

A customer profile is a detailed description of who you are marketing to. Essentially, a customer profile gives your target market a name and a face.

Every business needs to have a customer profile because it allows for seamless branding throughout your company. When salespeople contact potential customers, they have a good idea who they’ll be talking to. In marketing, a customer profile helps with both social media and content creation. Check out our blog post on how to create a customer profile.

If your business needs help defining a target market, contact us and we’d be more than happy to help you through the process!