How to Define Your Target Market and Why It’s Important
If you haven’t defined your target market, you may be missing key opportunities.
If you know who you’re marketing to, you can employ tactics like search engine optimization and maximize your website design to speak to them more directly.
Why is knowing how to define your target market crucial and how do you do it?
Read on to find out more.
Why Your Target Market Matters
When you don’t define your target market, you make the mistake of trying to reach everyone. As a result, you tend to reach, well, no one!
One of the biggest goals of marketing is to show consumers how your product or service solves their specific problem. If you don’t know who your audience is, you don’t know what their problems are. If you aren’t solving a problem, you aren’t giving consumers a reason to purchase your product or service!
Plus, defining your target market gives you the opportunity to focus your marketing research. Where do these consumers shop? What social media do they use?
Most importantly, what language speaks to them? People tend to respond best to the kind of language they use, themselves, or the language they see from other businesses they like. They may even search for information a certain way and if you don’t have those answers, you may not turn up in their searches.
Finally, when you know your target market and their problems, you can begin to find new ways to solve those problems. That means you can come up with new product lines or services that are catered to your consumers’ needs.
How to Define Your Target Market
The real question is, how do you define your target market?
First of all, you need to think in terms of demographics. This includes the age, gender, income, and marital status of your market. It also includes things like personality, taste, and values.
Now, step back and look at your primary products or services. Who is most likely to use them? More importantly, who is using them already?
If there is a gap between what you’d expect your target market to look like and who your market currently is, assess the reasoning behind that. Interview current customers to find out why they like your products. Take note of both what they say and what they don’t mention that you expected them to.
Finally, look at your competitors. Who buys their products or follows their social media accounts? How are they appealing to that target market in ways that you are not?
Once you have all of this information, create what we call a customer profile. Go into detail about who they are, what they like, and what they respond positively to. From now on, when you create new marketing material, create it for this customer profile.
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If you know how to define your target market but don’t know how to reach them, let us help you.
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