Hitting Your Target

By Stacy Karacostas

If you've ever heard or read anything about marketing, you're probably already familiar with the term target market. If not, you should be.

Why? Because your target market is those people who are most likely to buy your product. And ideally, they are also the people who can be contacted and convinced to buy with the least amount of money and effort.

If you don't know who your target market is, chances are your marketing is too general to produce really good results. You're basically just throwing stuff at a wall and hoping something sticks.

But if you're going to hit your target, you have to know where to aim.

So how you do define your target market?

To be honest with you, big firms regularly hire consultants and spend thousands of dollars on market research in order to determine their target markets. But if you don't have that kind of budget, don't despair.

A little brainstorming, some careful research and a smidge of logic can go a long way towards honing in on who you should be selling to.

Let me show you what I mean with a very simple example…Say I sell all-natural, moisturizing facial soap. Now if I ask you who my target market is, you could say "anybody with a face".

That wouldn't be wrong, but think about how much it would cost to try to market to anybody and everybody. Unless you've got a really big budget, it just isn't going to happen.

Besides which, some people simply don't care about how they clean their face. Your marketing dollars would be wasted on them.

So let's narrow it down even further and say my target market is anyone who likes to take good care of their skin. And it's common sense to say that the majority of those people are likely to be women.

Now we're getting closer. But because I sell all-natural soap, it also makes sense to focus on women who already purchase other all-natural products. That way I don't have to spend time and money educating them on the benefits of buying all-natural.

From there, we can continue to narrow the market down by age, income, education, religious affiliation, hobbies and interests, number of children, marital status, buying habits and a long list of other factors that all fall under the headings of demographics and psychographics (FYI, the Internet is a terrific resource for this sort of information. For this example I might Google "women health food demographics").

Once I've identified my target market, reaching them becomes much easier-and more cost-effective. For example, instead of placing expensive ads in national or regional magazines, I could get a mailing list of women age 25-45 who subscribe to a particular magazine, then send out a series of coupons, mailers and sample soap straight to their door.

The bottom line is I can now design my marketing specifically to get my target's attention, and address their needs and concerns.

In fact, I can aim everything from my packaging design to the content on my Website directly at my target market.

Now my chances of hitting the mark go way, way up!

Ready to define your target market?

You can certainly go through a process much like I just did. But if you've been in business a while, and are continuing to market the same products and services, there is a shortcut you can use.

All you have to do is review your books and figure out which
clients consistently bring in the most net revenue. It's not
uncommon to find that about twenty percent of your customers bring in eighty percent of your revenues. And it's a pretty good bet that these clients are part of your primary target market.

So make a list of your best clients and the demographics and psychographics they have in common. These traits offer a perfect framework for defining your target market.

Once you've got your target in mind, just aim your company,
products or services straight at the bulls-eye. That way when you fire your marketing arrow, you can hit the target time after time.

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