You’ve thought of a business idea. You’re aware of the concept, and what it does and you’re all set to get started. However, one thing remains to be answered who are you planning to market it to?
The answer may not be as clear as it appears in the case of most people. You may have a notion of the people you want to reach–perhaps “moms” or “college students”–but it’s just a fraction of the tale.
Identifying the best potential market for your new or existing company is all about understanding what they’re looking for. It is also important to know the reasons why people purchase products initially. It’s a process that takes time and study.
But don’t worry! We’ve got some excellent tips to determine your target market for your new or old businesses in this blog article. We’ll also answer the most frequently asked questions regarding identifying your target market throughout the process.
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What Is A Target Market?
The term “target market” refers to the group of people that you wish to market your products as well as services. Think of it as a dartboard that is huge: you’re trying to target a specific group of people, and you’re hoping to hit this demographic in the target.
As an example, let’s say you’re selling a new type made of peanut butter. In this case you could focus on young mothers who are looking for better alternatives to the products available. If you’re selling an online course for making money at home, you could focus on those who are interested in starting their own business, but do not know how to start.
The goal of the market is being aware of the people you wish to market to. It is also important to find out how many people are within that particular group, and what they share (e.g. gender, age geographical area).
Now that we’ve discussed the basics of what a market to target is, let’s find out how to locate one that is right for your company.
How To Identify Your Target Market: Step-By-Step Guide
In the realm of marketing, the rule is to focus your efforts on a the basis of a specific degree. This could be accomplished by using psychographics, demographics, or even geographical areas. If you’re uncertain of where to begin this step-by-step tutorial for identifying the market you want to target:
Step 1A: Gather data about your customers currently.
If you’re fortunate enough to have a wide range of clients look them up and discover the common traits they share.
Here are some of the demographics marketing professionals use to measure:
- Geographical locations (e.g. locations in for example, the Northeast as well as in the U.S.)
- The age range (e.g. age range of 18-24 or 55-70 years old)
- Gender (e.g. male female, transgender or male)
- The income level (e.g. 30, 000 per each year)
- Education levels (e.g. people who have PhDs or those with a high-school education)
- Ethnicity (e.g., African-American, Asian-American, or Caucasian)
Here is a list of psychographics that they test, typically tested in a test:
- Personality
- Attitudes
- Lifestyle
- Values
- Interests
- Purchase habits
After you’re finished making your final decision, you should be aware that you’re not writing about an individual who exists, but rather an ideal audience(for instance, dental mailing lists). A perfect audience is one that who you believe are interested by your product.
Step 1B: Utilize focus groups.
If you are a brand startup business or new entrepreneur you should begin with market research to find the market you want to target.
This can be done through focus groups, where you inquire about the things that people enjoy, dislike, and require for your products or services. Focus groups are an excellent opportunity to learn about the type of customer you are targeting and what they’d like from your business.
The focus groups may be conducted either in person or via online. They are scheduled in advance or carried out on the spot within a campaign for marketing. They let you see the way people respond when presented with a variety of alternatives for goods or services. You can then use this information to make smart decisions about the best places to invest your money in marketing campaigns.
One method of conducting an online focus group study is to contact particular groups by using specific email contact lists. For instance, you could mail questionnaires to people from different areas with the email lists. Bookyourdata offers a database of teacher email lists, databases of retail emails as well as oil and gas contact lists that are targeted to particular professions and demographics.
The aim of focus groups is to collect data qualitatively on how people feel about certain products or services or brands. They can help identify requirements and needs that consumers might not realize they have.
Focus groups: How to utilize them to determine the target audience
Focus groups are a fantastic method to determine your ideal customers, particularly when you’re a small-sized business with a small budget.
Here are some helpful tips using focus groups to determine your market segment:
- It is recommended to have at five people participating in each focus group (the more, the better!)
- Choose topics which will stimulate discussion among the participants about their experiences using comparable products and services (this helps in creating products that are tailored to their needs)
- Pose open-ended questions such as
- “What’s important about X?”
- “What does Y mean to you?”
- Instead of questions that require a yes or no answer, such as “Do you like X?”. Open-ended questions can get more details from participants instead of simple yes/no question.
- Learn who’s the most likely to purchase your products as well as services. You can do this by asking them questions about their routines and what they do during their free time.
- Ask them why they choose to use specific products or services over others so you understand what makes one company stand out in their minds.
- Ask them about how much they are willing to spend on certain items or services at various times of the year (e.g. Christmas vs. summer). This will give you information about the amount of money each customer is willing to buying additional items all through the year.
- Ask the customer how often they purchase specific items and services (e.g. weekly instead of once a month) to determine how often each client requires an item or service.
Step 2: Research your competition.
You can identify your ideal market and how best to get them to listen by
- analyzing your competitors
- Analyzing their marketing strategies, and finally
- creating your own strategy in accordance with.
If, for instance, you are looking to open a bakery that sells vegan baked products, take a look at other bakeries offering vegan alternatives. Check out which ones are receiving the most interest from customers.
This will provide you with an idea of the types of customers are purchasing their products. The information can be used to establish pricing and advertising strategies that are targeted to a specific market. This will help you decide which areas to target the marketing effort.
Are they doing well?
The first step is to look over your competitors web pages. Examine their offerings and services in order to determine patterns within their strategies for marketing. Are they focusing on a particular geographical or demographic group? What kind of offers do they use? What types of advertisements are they running?
What works for one person may not be a good fit for you.
Finding out the strategies that work for them is important do not assume that their strategies can be applied to your business too. You might find that certain aspects of their campaigns are not relevant or pertinent to your business’s model.
Step 3: Take a look at the product.
If you’re in a hurry and need to get help, instead of an approach that is top-down, try the bottom-up approach. It’s to look at the product’s features and identify those who might be interested in it, based on the psychology.
The idea behind this strategy is that the main factor is understanding the way that people think. Also that if you are knowledgeable about the human mind and how it affects your product then you’ll be able identify who could be interested in your product.
Consider first your “psychological segmentation” of your audience. This means instead of categorizing people by income or age instead, you categorize them according to their personality characteristics.
For instance, suppose you’re selling a clothing line to teenagers at the high-school level. In this case you could categorize them according to their conformity level and the degree of rebellion. Perhaps you’re offering a brand new app to iPhone users. You could categorize your customers by their personality type, such as “extroverted” or “introverted.”
If you’re selling a brand new operating computer system. You can create ads that target those with certain traits such as:
- Skeptics -People trying every operating system, but aren’t happy
- Geeks – Computer programmers who require something robust but simple to use
- Techie moms – women who are tech-savvy, but still need a user-friendly interface for their children’s laptops
Once you’ve identified these mental segments in your target market, you need to focus on what they think and feel. If, for instance, you’re selling an app targeted at introverts, it’s important to determine what things they are interested in. Perhaps it’s reading books, and listening to songs through headphones while taking public transport.
It is important to understand the different consumers think, and how they feel, so that when they encounter the product you offer or services they’ll instantly recognize the value of it.
Step 4: Conduct a campaign.
Once you’ve determined your market segment then it’s time to launch an advertising campaign. It can be done via direct mail or social media, email, as well as other channels on the internet.
You can, for instance, purchase an email database of people by profession (especially beneficial for market to B2B) at Bookyourdata.com. Bookyourdata also offers an application for building lists that can help you build a marketing list with filters that match the target market you’ve identified.
For instance, suppose you’re searching for potential home buyers who are located in California and have chosen them as your ideal market. If that’s the scenario, you could use this tool to make an inventory of all the people who fit these criteria. You can then contact them via either email or telephone.
You can also make use of Facebook as well as Twitter to make ads for your specific segments. There is also the option of doing more “classical” advertising, but it is likely to not yield intricate figures, so be careful when spending lots of cash.
In determining ways to reach your audience, consider the activities they engage in every day. If the person you want to reach is in a work environment Sending them an email may be efficient. However the sending of an SMS might be better suited if they were using their mobiles all day.
If you intend to send emails with a specific campaign, a great idea is to use an affordable email list provider. Consider BookYourData as a resource by which you will be able to access an extensive list of email addresses databases available for sending targeted emails to.
Make sure your message is concise and clear to ensure that it isn’t lost in the crowd. The goal is to make people interested enough to click your link (if relevant) or complete the form (if it’s the purpose of a lead generation campaign).
Step 5: Review and narrow your scope.
Sometimes, marketing can feel as if you’re throwing darts against the wall after closing your eyes and then reopening them to ask “Did it work?” It is important to have enough information today to assess your campaign to determine whether it’s successful or not.
If you’ve taken an appropriate direction maybe your next campaign will be able to focus your attention on a wider audience. Bookyourdata’s continuous updates such as the insurance agents’ emails database updates to gain more information to narrow your market further. After reviewing the previous campaigns. You might need to utilize the list-builder filter in order to alter the age range, as well as specific places or narrow it further.
It is important to recognize that identifying your ideal market isn’t an isolated occasion. Your market of choice will shift as time passes, based on technological as well as economic and competitive changes. Therefore, it’s important to keep track of your audience and make sure that your messages are relevant and attractive.
This is the most important step to lather, rinse, and repeat! After a few times you’ll have a established audience.
How Important Is Identifying Your Target Market?
The identification of your market’s needs can be a crucial aspect of your business’s strategy. When you identify and understand the needs of your targeted market, you can develop a marketing plan to improve customer engagement and increase sales.
Here are some of the reasons it is essential to determine your market segment:
Maximizing Profit
Knowing your market’s target is vital to maximize the potential for profit. Choosing the right market can enable you to earn more. The more precisely you identify your audience more straightforward it will be to promote your product or service.
Avoiding Waste
It isn’t a good idea to waste money and time on marketing strategies that don’t work. You can simplify your marketing strategy by determining your market prior to establishing a strategy for marketing. The information on your target market will help you focus on the people who are most likely to buy from you instead of wasting your time and money on people who aren’t likely to purchase from you.
Understanding Needs
Knowing the market you are targeting helps you understand what they want from your business and why they choose to purchase from other businesses operating in the same industry as you do. This information can be used to develop unique selling propositions (USPs) that are a hit with your clients. Your USP sets you apart from rivals who also target this particular segment.
Increase Customer Engagement
The identification of your target market will allow you to focus your marketing efforts to this particular group of people. With this information you will be able to reach them much more effectively via email, social media marketing direct mail campaigns, as well as other strategies specifically designed for this specific audience.
Save Money on Marketing Costs
Campaigns targeted to specific groups are cheaper in comparison to campaigns that are mass-marketed. This is due to the fact that they’re concentrated on a specific group of people that are more likely to be receptive to relevant incentives and offers. It is also possible to save money by not the expense of ads that aren’t appropriate for certain groups of people or aren’t targeted enough.
What makes identifying the Target Market crucial when it comes to email marketing?
The identification of the market you want to target is essential for email marketing as it aids in crafting your message to be appropriate to your target audience. It also lets you divide or classify your subscribers according to their preferences and needs.
The best method to end an email campaign is by using an already-built email list, such as an CFO email list and not knowing your company’s true target group of customers.
Sure, the terms demographics, psychographics geography, profiling, and psychographics could sound like a flimsy and bizarre. But, they are conducted by the top researchers of the best to a point. Make the effort to learn about your customers’ needs now and your marketing department will be thankful for it.
Alongside knowing your audience’s needs understanding how they prefer to be contacted can aid in creating an effective email marketing strategy. This is especially important when establishing an email nurture sequence.
If you are aware that your subscriber is looking for more information on a particular subject or product. If that’s the scenario, you can utilize these details to mail relevant emails that respond to the subscribers’ questions and solve their issues. If you don’t, you may send out irrelevant emails that won’t solve any issues for your readers.
This false information could lead users to unsubscribe from your mailing list completely since they’re fed up of receiving useless information from you.
