The Key To Success: Knowing Your Target Market

Who is your ideal customer? If you still haven’t figured that out, we suggest you do. Being aware of your target markets geographic location, demographics, and psychographics gives your business the upper hand in knowing how and where to market your product or service. Here, we will break down the most important segments to consider, a few tips on how to get to know your target market and why it’s important for any business to succeed.

Attempting to market your product or service to everyone will lead to a significant financial loss as well as losing half of the intended audience because it doesn’t interest nor apply to them. There are three main categories to consider when researching your target market; geographics, demographics, and psychographics.

As all parts of segmentation are important, geographics are a great place to start. Logically, it would be unlikely that someone from Germany would be interested in a product or service only offered in North American, and vice-versa. Geographic segmentation, as straightforward as it sounds, is defined by choosing which geographic locations your business will market to. If a business is local, they should focus on surrounding communities. As for a business that is national, they should focus on the country. There would be no benefit for marketing outside the designated geographic areas.

Once geographic locations are established, it’s time to dig a little deeper. Demographic segmentation divides the chosen group into more defined traits. Who is your target market?Factors to inquire are age, gender, race, marital status, occupation, education and household income.

Geographics and demographics are very important for businesses to inform themselves on where and who is the ideal target market, but what’s left to decipher is how to market to them. Psychographic research deepens the refining of the target market by taking into account the following factors: lifestyle, religious views, hobbies, interests, and opinions. Other behavioral traits that align with psychographics and demographics are customers pattern of use, do they buy for the brand or the price?

I’ll use toothpaste as an example. The usage is daily, and they probably need to buy a new one every 1-3 months – depending if they buy in bulk or not. Do they opt for the more expensive brand that whitens and protects enamels or are they more budget conscious and buy the brand on special? What benefits are they looking for? And, if they’re loyal to a specific brand, why?

All of this segmentation factors will help any business determine where, who and how to market their product or service as efficiently as possible.

Looking at case studies similar to your product or service is a great place to start. Another way is to observe competitors and who is buying their product or service. Doing research also offers the advantage to find out what your competitors aren’t doing. Are they only serving high-end customers? Perhaps your business can focus on selling quality,  affordable goods and services, thus attracting a slightly different target market that is budget conscious.

Create a customer persona as an example of who is your ideal customer. Break it down to geographic, demographic, and psychographic segmentation. Here’s an example:
Mike, male, is 32 years old and lives in Montreal, Quebec. He is the CEO of x company and earns $100,000 annually. Mike graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree in business. He enjoys taking his wife out to dinner at fine cuisine restaurants at least once a week and occasional Friday night drinks with his work friends. Mike spends a good amount of time shopping online because of the convenience. He personally prefers high-quality products and services, disregarding the price.

Conducting large or small-scale surveys are an efficient way to learn more about your target market. Large-scale surveys will give businesses an overview of who is their target market from a list of multiple-choice questions. Small-scale surveys can offer deeper insight by using open-ended questions to know more about their personality traits, behavior and what attracts them. Both types of surveys are beneficial in different ways depending on what the business needs to know to fill the gaps of their target market research.

Listen to what potential customers are saying online; what are their interests, opinions, and hobbies? Who do they interact with most often? What trends do they follow? Social media is an excellent way to get to know your target market more personally.

Take a look at who is on your site. How long are they staying there and what pages do they spend the most amount of time browsing? If it’s an e-commerce website, how many are going through the buying process? How many transactions were uncompleted? Take all these factors into account in order to find ways to optimize your website.

Knowing about your target market is the best way to benefit your business because you’ll have the knowledge on where to market your product or service, who is interested in it, and how to appeal to them. Having in-depth knowledge of your target market also allows you to refine your SEO and optimize your website and landing pages in order to appeal to their particular taste. Educating yourself on who is exactly your target market is a definite way to offer them something they will actually want, sell similar things to your competitors but in different ways and increase your business’ earnings, brand awareness and, with hopes, eventually brand loyalty.

Links: Defining a Target Market, Market Segmentation, Learn about Your Audience, Knowing Your Audience is the Key to Success