How to identify a target market
Are you wondering how to target a market for your product or service? Here is what you need to know.
What is targeting?
A target market is a group of customers that shares similar characteristics and interests, making these customers more likely to want to buy your products and services. This could be related to income, geography, interests, lifestyle, or a combination of factors.
Why is targeting important?
Targeting is essential in large markets, where only a certain type of customer is likely to be interested in your offer. By defining the target market, you have a far better chance of successfully marketing your offer to these customers.
How to target your market
You will need to define your offer and know what makes your products or services desirable. From here, you will track data using collection strategies that help you to further pin down your target market. This could include data sources such as POS analytics, mass marketing campaigns, and social media.
From this point, you can begin to define your ideal target audience and your ideal client, narrowing down groups until you find a target group with similar characteristics. You could look at demographics, psychographics (attitudes, beliefs, interests, values, lifestyle) and behavioural segmentation to do this profiling. Geographic characteristics will be important for location-based products and services.
Once this stage has been completed, you can refine your thinking by conducting market research with target customer groups, former customers, current customers, and ideal customers to work out whether you are on track. You can then conduct research into the targets your competitors are focusing on. Professional marketing strategy consultants, such as www.reallyhelpfulmarketing.co.uk/specialist-services/marketing-strategy-consultant/, can make this process quicker and more accurate.
These steps will help you define your target market, which is an ongoing process that requires a lot of skill, data, analysis, and adjustment over time. It is also the key to a successful overall marketing strategy and the way to build a profitable business, so it is essential to invest in the process and take it all the way before setting a product price.