6 Steps to Identifying Your Target Market

“You have to know your customer or your lead better than anyone else because the way that you talk to your people is going to vary only based on who they are and what you’re selling to them.”

On a recent Marketer Monday, I talked about how, with a little tweaking, any of our great marketing guides can be applied to any industry. To successfully fit our guides to your industry and business you must first define and identify your target market.

Many businesses say their target is, “anyone interested in their services,” but even small businesses can compete with the big guys by targeting their niche market. Targeting a specific market doesn’t mean you’re excluding those who do not fit, it means focusing your marketing dollars and effort on a specific audience that is more likely to buy from you.

With a clearly identified target market, it becomes much easier to determine where and how to market your company.

Step One: Identify the Problems You Solve

A great starting point to identifying your target market is to understand the problems you and your business solves with your products and/or services. Write out a list of each feature of your service or product, and next to each feature list the benefits.

Once you have a good idea of what problem your business solves, you can move on to start working out who is suffering from these problems.

Step Two: Check Out Your Current Customer Base

Who are your current customers and why are they buying from your business? Is there a common characteristic or interest? The stakes are high that there are other people like them who could benefit from your product or service.

Step Three: Research the Competition

One of the easiest steps, check out your competition! Who are they targeting? What are their current customers like? You may find a niche or service that they are overlooking.

Step Four: Decide on Specific Demographics to Target

Figuring out not only who has a need for your product or service, but who is most likely to buy is very important when it comes to identifying your target market.

Factors like age, gender, income level, education level, ethnic background or occupation are all important factors that will help you identify that key target market for your business.

Step Five: Take Account of Your Target Market’s Psychographics

Psychographics is the classification of people according to their attitudes or aspirations. These are the more personal characteristics like attitudes, values, hobbies, and behavior and they have a huge impact on identifying your target market.

How is your product or service going to fit into your target market’s lifestyle? What are the most appealing features to your target? Where does your target audience go for information? These are some of the questions you can answer once you identify the psychographics of your target customer.

Step Six: Evaluate

Once you have identified your target market, there are a few things to consider and questions to ask yourself:

• Can my target market afford my product/service?
• What is driving my target audience to make buying decisions?
• Will my target customer benefit from my product or service? Do they even need it?
• Can I reach them easily with any my message?

If you’re wondering how you can find all this information, just do a quick search for what target markets others in your industry have identified. Forums and blogs for your industry are another great resource!

Defining and identifying your target market is the hard part, but once you know who you are targeting, it becomes easier to create messages that will resonate with them. Even better, you’ll save money and get a better ROI once you’ve defined your target market!

Bonus Step: Stay Up-To-Date!

Subscribe to Performance Marketer YouTube channel and keep up-to-date with all future Marketer Monday videos. I’ll be sharing the newest real world marketing strategies plus my experience from the past ten years of building online businesses!

If you have any questions just let me know by commenting below this video!

Read more: Social Sleuthing: Using Your Competitors’ Social Media to Craft New Target Profiles