How do you define a target market?
Try to describe your target market with as much detail as you can. Resist the temptation to be too general in the hopes of getting a larger slice of the market. That’s like firing 10 bullets in random directions instead of aiming just one at the centre of the mark – expensive and dangerous.
Try to describe your target market with as much detail as you can, based on your knowledge of your product or service. Rope family and friends into visualisation exercises (“Describe the typical person who will hire me to paint the kitchen floor to look like marble…”) to get different perspectives – the more, the better.
Here are some questions to get you started:
- Are your target customers male or female?
- How old are they?
- Where do they live? Is geography a limiting factor for any reason?
- What do they do for a living?
- How much money do they make? This is most significant if you are selling relatively expensive or luxury items. Most people can afford a carob bar. You can’t say the same of custom murals.
- What other aspects of their lives matter? If you’re launching a roof-tiling service, your target customers probably own their homes.
Why is it important to define your target market?
The first thing that you will have to ask yourself is who is your ideal customer or client? If you don’t have an answer for this then it is not advisable to go any further.
In marketing, if you don’t have a target market, you are taking a chance with your time, money and your business. Take the time to sit down and re-look at your offering and then decide what type of person would be perfect for your product or service. It’s all about, Geographic’s, demographics and psychographics. You need to know who you are talking to.
Once you know who your target market is, you can begin designing a plan around that. You can decide how you will market to them, how they will get to know your brand and how they will take a liking to your product or service.
If you try and send out a mass marketing message, you will end up losing half of your target market simply because it doesn’t apply to them. By refining your marketing approach you won’t have to waste your marketing budget by speaking to the wrong market. Being focused allows for effective marketing strategies and provides you with a better return.
What criteria should I use to define a target market more narrowly?
Once upon a time, business owners thought it was enough to market their products or services to “18- to 49-year-olds”. Those days are a thing of the past. Because the consumer marketplace has become so differentiated, it’s a misconception to talk about the marketplace in any kind of general way anymore.
Now, you have to decide whether to market to socio-economic status or to gender or to region or to lifestyle or to technological sophistication. There’s no end to the number of different ways you can slice the pie.
Further complicating matters, age no longer means what it used to. Fifty-year-old baby boomers prefer rock ‘n roll to armchair travel; 30-year-olds may still be living with their parents. People now repeat stages and recycle their lives. You can have two men who are 64 years old, and one is retired and driving around in a Beemer, and the other is just remarried with a toddler in his house.
Generational marketing, which defines consumers not just by age, but also by social, economic, demographic and psychological factors, has been used since the early 1980s to give a more accurate picture of the target consumer.
A newer twist is cohort marketing, which studies groups of people who underwent the same experiences during their formative years. This leads them to form a bond and behave differently from people in different cohorts, even when they are similar in age. For instance, people who were young adults in the 1950s behave differently from people who came of age during the tumultuous ’60s, even though they are close in age.
To get an even narrower reading, some entrepreneurs combine cohort or generational marketing with life stages, or what people are doing at a certain time in life (getting married, having children, retiring) and physiographics, or physical conditions related to age (nearsightedness, arthritis, menopause).
Today’s consumers are more marketing savvy than ever before and don’t like to be “lumped” with others, so make sure you understand your target market. While pinpointing your market so narrowly takes a little extra effort, entrepreneurs who aim at a small target are far more likely to make a direct hit.