Are you planning to develop your business?
Then you should definitely know what target market is.
A target market is an important marketing term. No matter what business you are doing you have to know how to target the audience.
It is more important to the success of your business.
Marketing is not about giving advertisement. You have to attract new business.
If you want to achieve this, you have to target audience. For that first, you have to know your target market before reaching them.
Even if you are selling small items, you need to understand your customer if you want to promote your business. For this, you need to ask yourself the following questions
Good Questions To Ask Yourself:
- To whom you are selling the product? First, you have to narrow down the customers to make your marketing work easy. You can develop strategies especially to target them.
- Why should they buy your product/service? It is very important what you have to offer to your customers. To do this first you need to identify your product feature.
- What makes your product/service unique from all other products? List down all unique features of your product. Make it impressive to attract your targeted audience.
- What will they get from your product? You can tell them what they can expect from your product. You can make it believable by giving survey results and open poll.
These are some basic question every entrepreneur should ask. If you have answers to it, it becomes easy to understand the term target market. Now, let us check what is the exact meaning of the term.
What is a Target market?
Target market and target audience both words have the same meaning.
When a business aims a group of customers to try their marketing efforts and its products it is known as target marketing. That group of customers is called target customers.
Target marketing is a very crucial marketing strategy.
To have successful marketing, you should know your target audience first. They are the one who decides your business future. If you choose a clear well -focused target audience, you can be a great success.
Target audience differs based on each business. When you are marketing blogs about parenting, you should target new moms. You want to attract them towards your blog by using various strategies.
Targeting a particular audience doesn’t mean to exclude others. It means you are focusing on a particular group who will likely buy your product than other audience. This is much more effective than targeting the whole market.
Why is target market important?
To persuade people to buy or use a product you need to connect with them. By connecting with them a trust develops and it helps you in the future.
For Example, if you are aiming working women you have to impress them through online advertisement. But when you target senior citizens a new paper ad will do the job.
So, there are different marketing strategies for different people. You have to implement them accordingly. Know your audience well is the prime requirement in marketing. There are three approaches to selecting target marketing.
Approaches to Target Marketing:
1. Mass marketing:
- In this approach, the business targets the whole market and disregard segments
- Product focus on customers needs and their common requirements irrespective of their difference
2. Segmented Marketing:
- It targets different marketing segments within the same market
- Products are designed and targeted at each segment
- It requires a separate marketing plan for each segment
3. Concentrated:
- Business focus narrowly on smaller niche
- You have to work to achieve a strong marketing position within that niche.
Now you got an idea about target marketing. Let us now move on to various types of target marketing strategies to concentrate.
Target Marketing Strategies to Consider:
Make a detailed marketing plan:
Everyone starts a business with certain marketing goals. List down everything about your product/service. Do your homework before marketing.
This helps to create a good base and you can easily generate your target market.
Learn from your current customer:
Impress people who buy a product from you. Then only they buy it again and again. You can identify the common characteristic of your customer base through website analysis.
Understanding your current customers helps you in building up your project.
You can learn many things by breaking down your sales and identifying top customers. Excluding people from your focus doesn’t mean that you don’t want them to buy the product.
But, if you can focus on a particular group, it will enhance your efficiency and ensures high revenue potential.
Prioritize your audience:
Once you got an idea of how people can get benefits from your product, the next step is gathering your product beneficiaries.
By narrowing your observation, market your product efficiently. You can use the following 3 methods for prioritization.
a. Find out your product’s need:
That means find out who is going to use your product. While answering you have to consider factors like age, geographical location, marital status, job etc.
Do a detailed marketing study to know the characteristic of your audience. By knowing you can find new ideas to attract that particular group.
b. Funnel approach will help you:
If you are handling a small business then this approach will help you to target the audience. For example, first, categorize your product gender wise if it is applicable.
It helps to narrow down your audience. As the next filter, you can choose the age range. From that audience, you can again prioritize them on the basis of their income.
This is a small example to make the idea clear. Like this, you can be more focused on targeting your audience. You can try a different combination of filters to check whether you get a different result.
c. Emphasize the qualities of your product:
After finding out your target market and the audience you have to think about your product value. Think about what you can offer your customers.
For example, if your company is making a portable car seat, you are likely to target parents. Parents who travel frequently will like your product.
So, whatever you are marketing, try to list out its values and draw a line to demographic groups that prioritize these values.
Obtain data from various sources:
You have to include data from research. It could be from various sources. So, gather it from those available sources.
a. Draw an existing data:
If there is a similar product in the market like yours then research on it. Do as much homework as possible.
Check who are interested in those products?
What are they offering?
When do they buy them?
You can get all the details online as well as offline. By analyzing all gathered data, you will get an idea of specific types of target customers.
Start to list different types of customers that will get benefits from your product. Group them by location, market sector and so on.
Define them in as many applicable ways as possible. It helps you to target your audience on the basis of various characters.
b. Gather data online:
You can search for various social media sites to know how customers feel about your product. Also, what they are saying about your product and offers etc.
Listen to various social media forums and platforms where your product is mentioned. You can also do surveys to get more useful opinions.
All of them helps to develop your product quality and marketing strategies.
Facebook has its value even now. More than 70% of people who use the internet are Facebook account holders.
So, you can communicate with your targeted audience through this medium. Find out what they are talking about, what is their issue and what they care about. You can know them. It will help you to prioritize your audience.
Each social media platform has its own function. You can use them as per your product nature.
For example, LinkedIn is a place where people go for work-related activity. If you are promoting any tools or apps that help them to make their work easy, you can promote it through that platform.
c. Look at your own network:
You can use your own network to gather data. When you are with family or friends notice the products, they are using.
You can ask about your product to them. Also, give them samples of your product and ask them for review. Widen your network to your colleagues, mentors etc.
This process will help you to get an actual review of your product. It helps to get a clear view of your target market. After gathering data, you can draw a different perspective as you build your marketing efforts.
After a continual effort to identify your target customers, you can achieve a great result for sure.
Check competition:
It is a good idea to get more new strategies. You don’t have to copy their ideas. Take inspiration from the competitor’s ideas and develop new strategies.
Check their target audience. What are they offering to attract them etc? One important thing is that don’t follow the same market. You must think in advance like what will be their future target.
Importance of strategic thinking:
Strategic thinking is the decisions about actions, a company needs to take in advance to bring success. There are benefits when you can do strategic thinking
You will get a fresh look at the business environment and can decide the steps you need to take to strengthen your business
You can review your strength and weakness and can apply marketing strategies to strengthen the weak areas
You can set a new goal by revising your strategies and marketing techniques.
Creating Personas will help you:
By identifying your target audience, you can promote your brand well. It helps to build up motivations and interest that empowers your readers.
If you get a picture of your prospective audience, you can make contents that they may like.
For that, you have to cover some details like who, what, when, where and why. In addition to that, take some note on the following aspects
- Demographics: It means who they are? What is their age, gender, profession, income etc?
- Psychographics: It’s about their interest, personality, values, attitudes, likes, and dislikes
- Behavioral: What are they doing? Their interest in publications, media etc.
As you find your prospective audience, while creating every content, email, blogs or other marketing messages keep them in mind.
You have to work to understand them better and develop ideas to reach them with your message.
Know your market:
Don’t waste your time and money to attract a broad audience. It won’t help you.
You should develop a strategy to focus on the right group of people to gain success. It is easier for them to attract by advertising on the right platforms.
There are many free platforms where you can advertise your product. Know your audience and advertise to reach them through the right platforms.
For example, if you are selling a bike it is better to target people who are buying a new bike, than the one who already owns one. Develop your strategies that delight and excite your customers. If they got impressed, they will love you and your product/service.
Put it all together:
You have to position your product in right place to make it a huge success. Design strategies especially for them.
For that, you need to differentiate your product from your competitors. Give unique features to them.
Don’t copy others. Try to deliver your product better than your competitor’s. Put all data together and reach a successful conclusion.
In conclusion, targeting an audience is not an easy task. It needs hard works and patience. You can’t conquer the market in a short time.
It is a time- consuming process. These are opinions of popular business experts. You can follow them to get a better result.
Consumers are smarter now than ever before. So be aware of your target market. Making your target market narrower need some extra effort.
According to the latest survey, entrepreneurs who aimed small target made a direct hit when compared to others.
If you are a newbie in business all the terms and concepts could be new to you. So, invest some time to understand all concepts and strategies and try them.
Sometimes you may get a good result out of it. But don’t stop trying if you fail. Learn new lessons from your mistakes. Be patient and focused.