The first and most important lesson in marketing (you can also treat it like a rule) is that if your target market is everybody, then your target market is nobody – in other words, you don’t have a target market!
The wider the audience you target, the less effective your marketing will be! If you focus on a narrow audience, your marketing will be more effective.
If you define your target market right:
- you’ll know where to advertise
- you’ll know what to advertise
- you’ll know what to say in your advertisements
- you can lower your media buying costs
- you can increase the effectiveness of your ads
- you can create efficient and very powerful ads
The golden rule for the target market:
- big enough, so that it can provide a living for your business in the long run
- narrow and small enough, so that you can constantly and effectively market to it
How to define your target market?
Defining your target market accurately is the first and most important task of your marketing! But you have to be very careful how you define your target market because all your marketing, all the other tasks build upon, and depend on this one important first task.
So how do you define your target market the correct way then?
The correct way to define your target market is to define your target market using demographic aspects and psychographic aspects as well.
Demographic aspects or characteristics of your potential customers are: age, gender, income of your potential customer, where he lives, what he reads, where he collects information about a product or service, where he buys stuff, etc.
Psychographic aspects or characteristics of your potential customers are: What is the problem that he has? What is the thought in his mind that he comes to you with to buy or search for a solution? What benefits or advantages does he aspire for? What promises does he expect? How will he feel better by buying from you? How can you describe these feelings? What criteria does he use to choose a product? What criteria does he use to choose a business to buy the product? etc.
Defining your target market using these two aspects is not easy. Most of the time you have to go and search for the answers, other times you have to ask and survey your potential target market to find out the answers. But the reason you have to do define your target market using these aspects is, because the demographic aspects will tell you where to advertise and where can you reach your target market, and the psychographic aspects will tell you what and how to advertise!
What is a good target market?
- easy to describe from demographics and psychographics aspects
- easily reachable – through media or list
- suffers – has a problem that your company can solve
- is aware of the problem – knows about the problem or is experiencing the symptoms of the problem
To find your perfect buying market make sure that you divide the market into different target market segments, and then carefully analyze each segment.
Defining your ideal customer…
When you defined your target market you also have to define your ideal customer from that market (if you plan to go after more then one target market segment you have to define an ideal customer for every segment).
There’s two reasons why you need to do this:
- The main reason is, so that you can create ads and marketing materials that attract your ideal customers first. Nobody wants a business just to be miserable in it, and the best way to avoid this is to do business with people who don’t make you miserable.
- The second reason is, that by understanding what makes your ideal customer tick, you will have the opportunity to educate the “other” customers, and move them along the path to becoming ideal customers. You can systematically begin making sure that all of your customers know as much about how to be good customers as that small group of ideal customers know already.
Example of an ideal customer:
- he’s NOT especially price sensitive
- comes in regularly instead of waiting until there is an “urgent” need
- refers others to my business
- etc.
Hope this helps you defining your target market better, and as always, if you need help with it, here’s where you can ask for help.