Chapter 5:
About Your Target Market
Synopsis
Interview some individuals in your market by asking: What is working well for you today?
Tailor your services to supply solutions based on their answers. Practice discussing a bulleted list of particular benefits that you offer them. Never discuss vague concepts like helping them accomplish goals and fulfill their dreams. These have no selling power.
Things You Have To Know
The most successful small businesses recognize that only a limited number of people will buy their product or service or sign on. The task then becomes ascertaining, as closely as possible, exactly who those people are, and 'targeting' the business's marketing efforts and dollars towards them.
You, too, may build a better, stronger business, by identifying and serving a particular customer group - your target market.
Among the first things you have to do is to refine your product or service so that you're not attempting to be 'all things to all people.' Become a specialist!
Following, you need to comprehend that people purchase products or services or sign on for 3 basic reasons:
You'll need to find which of those categories your product or service is the solution to, and be geared up to market it accordingly.
Your product or service may fit more than one category, also.
The following step in producing an effective marketing technique is to zero in on your target market.
First of all, is your product international or national in range? Or is it more probable that you'll sell it primarily in your own area or community?
Let's suppose that your primary market is local or regional, and that you live in an area with a population of 35,000 people. The first things you'll have to do is research the 'demographics' of your area, and divide it into market sections:
Age: youngsters, teens, young, middle, aged
Sex: male, female
Education: senior high, college, university
Revenue: low, medium, high
Marital status: single, married, split up
Ethnic and/or spiritual background
Family life cycle: recently married, married for years, with or without youngsters.
This data ought to be available to you through your local town hall, library, or Chamber of Commerce - and the more detail you may get, the better.
Following, you have to segment the market as much as conceivable utilizing 'psychographics' as your guide:
Life-style: conservative, exciting, trendy, frugal
Socio-economic class: lower, middle, upper
Belief: easily led or opinionated
Actions and interests: sports, fitness, shopping, books
Mental attitude and beliefs: environmentalist, security conscious.
If you are a business-to-business company, you'll likewise have to think about the kinds of industries available to you, and their number of employees, yearly sales volume, location, and company stability. Additionally, you might wish to discover how they buy: seasonally, locally, only in volume, who makes the choices? It's crucial to note that businesses, unlike people, buy products or services for 3 reasons only: to better revenue, to sustain the status quo, or to minify expenses. If you fill one or more of these corporate needs, you may have found a target market.
Lots of times prospective leads don't know about your company, or can't tell the difference between your company and others. It's your job, once you realize who your best leads are, to 'target' the group that you've identified - even if you have rivalry.
Additionally, you may decide, utilizing the example above, that you'd likewise like to extend your target market to include women a bit older. If you go back to the basic reasons why people buy goods or services or sign on, and may find ways to target your efforts to that age bracket, you may be successful in capturing a greater share of the market!
On the other hand, what if you 'narrowed down' your product or service and then researched your target market, only to find that there are likely less than 75 people who will be interested in what you have?
First off, if those 75 are corporate leads who will spend 100s on your product or service yearly, then you've nothing to fear. But if those 75 are only going to produce 10 people who like your product or service - then you have to go 'back to the drawing board' of designing your business and possibly determining a wider target market - but at least you're armed with all the data you need to begin again, or go in another direction.
Really - there's a market, and a target market, for everything. If you don't think so, think about snuggies?