(Newswire.net — November 16, 2020) — Given the economy’s battered state right now, learning how to find your target market is more crucial than ever. But not everyone has the resources to target every single potential customer—especially small businesses. So, what should you do?
Small businesses can compete with larger companies by finding their niche market. Understanding target audiences can lead to more effective marketing campaigns for you since your customers will feel that your message resonates with them. So, let’s get into finding your target market and identifying your target audience.
What is a target market?
A target market is a group of consumers defined by their demographics and behavior. Target audiences, as they are otherwise called, are critical pillars of most businesses that influence decision-making, especially for marketing strategy. They determine how companies spend on marketing campaigns, how to appeal to potential customers, and what products to develop next.
They are also used to determine the buyer persona of a business. Buyer personas are a characteristic overview of your business’ ideal customer, usually drawn from market data, which is useful for identifying your target audience. Some of the key demographics and behavior that most businesses look out for are:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Employment
- Income
Why is it important to find your target market?
Although it may take some time to determine your target market, it will often lead to more savings on your marketing campaigns. But the first thing you need to do is define the product or service you’re offering, and then define the ideal customer that will most likely resonate with it. By doing so, you will discover how to meet your customer’s needs.
Aside from that, there are a lot of good reasons to find your target market:
Craft specific messages
Once you identify your target market, you can make ad campaigns/messages that will appeal to them. Also, each person’s needs are different, so you must make marketing messages that will reflect how each of their needs will be met.
Focus on potential
Your time and resources are precious, so it’s impossible for all of your customers to see your message. By identifying your target market, you can focus on those that are more likely to purchase your product.
Reach the right audience
After identifying your target market, your message will likely reach your target audience. There are many times when the buyer of your product is not the one who will use it, so your message must come across to the person who is making the purchase decision. A good target market example is for laundry detergents. Everyone in the family will benefit from it, but most people who go grocery shopping are women. So, ad campaigns for this product usually target women.
Find an underserved market
All businesses can benefit from identifying an underserved market. Instead of reaching out to every potential customer who would use your product, you can focus on a smaller, unreached market that will enable you to make a niche for your business.
Come up with cost-effective strategies
Once you know who you should be targeting, it will be much easier to make the right decisions for your media allocations. You’ll save your resources and potentially get a better return on your investment.
Learning how to identify your target audience from just one article (except if you already have a background in marketing) can be quite tricky. But there are some easy steps that you can follow.
Determine your specialty
You should start by narrowing your focus to exactly what you want to do for your customer by choosing a specialty. A specialty is the type or style of work you provide for your customers. For example, if you are a photographer, you could specialize in weddings, fashion, or food.
Use target market segmentation
Target market segmentation can be done by dividing your target market into easily identifiable groups. By doing this process, you can create subsets of a market based on needs, priorities, demographics, common interests, and other psychographic or behavioral factors. It can also make you more easily understand the target audience.
There are five basic types of market segmentation. They are:
- Geographic segmentation — Since customers in different regions have different needs, interests, preferences, and environment, knowing their location will be a big help in finding where to sell and advertise. Also, you can use this to see which areas to expand to in the future.
- Demographic segmentation — This sorts a market by demographic factors like age, income, education, race, gender, family size, occupation, nationality, etc. This type of segmentation is also the most popular, since demographics can influence potential customers’ spending habits.
- Firmographic segmentation — This subset is a bit similar to demographic segmentation, but the main difference is the latter focuses on the individual while the former looks at organizations. Firmographic segmentation considers a company’s size and the number of employees and shows how catering to a small business would differ from doing so for a larger corporation.
- Behavioral segmentation — This divides markets by their behaviors and decision-making patterns, like consumption, purchase, lifestyle, and usage. By grouping a market based on spending behaviors, you can develop a more targeted approach.
- Psychographic segmentation — This considers the psychological factors of consumer behavior by grouping markets according to personality traits, values, opinions, lifestyles, and interests.
Create your ideal customer profile
Knowing how to find your target market and your ideal customer enables you to identify who your marketing campaign should target. If you make your customer profile very detailed, you can more accurately focus on customers that need your product the most. They are also more likely to purchase your product.
There are three main benefits to creating a customer profile. It can help you:
- Focus your resources on high-quality leads — The more detailed your customer profile is, the more targeted your marketing campaigns will be. So, you’ll quickly identify and attract high-quality leads who are more likely to buy.
- Consistently meet sales targets — By letting your team focus on high-quality leads, you’ll waste less time and resources on following the wrong leads. A detailed customer profile will help you understand how to reach out to your customers and sell your products to them. So, you’ll also have more accurate estimates and more predictable sales.
- Improve your customer’s brand loyalty — For SaaS companies, creating a customer profile can enable you to streamline customer onboarding and reduce “customer churn.” By knowing your ideal customer, you can develop products or marketing campaigns that meet their needs.
- Get more referrals — Since your ideal customers get real value from your product, they’re more likely to recommend it to other potential customers.
Conduct primary and secondary market research
Primary research is any research you do by yourself (or hire someone to do for you). It involves going directly to the source (i.e., customers) to gather information. This includes interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc.
Meanwhile, secondary research involves gathering information from data that has already been collected or published by others. This includes looking at reports and studies by government agencies, organizations, and your competitors. Secondary research makes the most sense for most small businesses because it is cheaper to do and faster to complete.
Be receptive to feedback and opinions
Receiving feedback, be it positive or negative, is very helpful. It is valuable information that you can use to make big decisions. Most of the fastest-growing companies achieved this feat of expansion through always looking for ways to improve their products. For them, “continuous improvement” is not a mere cliche; it is their primary focus, and they are guided by the feedback they receive from customers, clients, employees, suppliers, and others.
Not only are these companies receptive to feedback, but they also actively seek it. They acknowledge that it is important to show their strengths and identify things that they need to improve.
Final thoughts
Marketing is key to your business. So, if you want to improve your product and grow your business exponentially, you can consult marketing experts like My Marketing Playbook for your next marketing campaign.
Finding your target market can be quite tricky at first. As you go on, though, it will get easier to figure out which platform you can use and what messages will resonate with your customers because you will have already found your ideal customer. Instead of targeting everyone in your area by sending them letters, you can only send them to those who fit your ideal customer profile. By doing this, you will save money and get a better return on investment.
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