Building a successful business starts by identifying your target audience. Targeting everyone will lead to failure, but targeting a specific audience leads your business on the path to victory. Creating a strong presence in the market is key to your business’ growth. Here are three steps that you should follow to determine your target market.
Demographics
“No problem, no sale,” says Robert L. Jolles in his book titled, Customer Centered Selling. Customers shop if they have unmet needs or problems; even ones of which they are unaware. You must recognize which unmet needs or problems your product or service is going to solve going to solve. Once you figure out that, it is wise to determine which markets are willing to spend money on your product. Categorizing your audience by gender, age, income, education level, location, race, and occupation will aid your search as to who will benefit the most from what your business has to offer. Here are some helpful tools that can help you define your target audience.
Psychographics
Psychographs, studies people’s values, attitudes, lifestyle and interests in order to provide assistance in marketing research. Knowing how your product will affect the psychographics of your audience is very important. Based on this, you will have a better understanding of your audience leading to the right tools to target them. The more you study your audience the better.
Exposure
According to Entrepreneur magazine, evaluating your competitors’ marketing strategies assists with the process of finding the target market. Taking a closer look at your competitors helps determine what strategies are working and which ones are not. Avoid making the same mistakes as your competitors.
There is no way you can target everyone, therefore targeting a specific audience will help your business achieve success. Narrowing down your target market will benefit you now and in the future if done correctly. According to Inc. magazine, once you have your target market the rest is a piece of cake.
