You should know your customers to serve them in the best way. Not everyone who purchases your services or products fits the same profile. However, as a company, you should have a core customer base in your mind. It would assist in streamlining the product offerings. It would also enable you to provide the customers with a great experience.
What is your target market?
You could describe the core customer base as your target market. These people would be most suited to your services and products. Therefore, it would be imperative for you to understand them.
It would be pertinent to mention here that understanding your target market is not about making assumptions. It would entail figuring out its requirements and motivations. Consider different demographics such as gender, age, occupation, education level, and family situation. These could assist in determining the needs of your customers along with their budget.
Consider determining who your customers are as people, the things they value, and their lifestyle. You should look forward to understanding what do those customers do in their spare time. When you find answers to these questions, you would understand the target market in the best possible way.
Ways to identifying the target market
Determining the target market is not as simple as guessing about your customers or hoping for a specific demographic. Rather, it would need a comprehensive review of your services and products, your potential customers, marketplace, and more.
Find below a few essential strategies to help grow your business with target market analysis.
- Analyzing your offerings
Ask yourself about the problems solved by your services and products and to whom they appeal. For instance, when operating a landscaping business, your services could be attractive to people having homes with lawns. It would specifically be helpful to people having a hectic lifestyle or no time to care for their yard. They could afford to pay someone to do the job for them.
Therefore, your target market should be inclusive of adults having a higher income and demanding jobs or children not having any time or interest in lawn care, but still want it to look great.
- Conducting a market research
Analyzing the target market entails understanding the customers and the marketplace. Several analytics tools would provide you an in-depth view of the landscape by identifying and assessing your counterparts. These tools would assist you in finding new customers and determine several ways to improve.
It would also help you size up the competition in your market. They would provide you with data inclusive of the other nearby businesses offering similar services and local customers spending in the same category. You could also find local demographic information such as income, education level, and household size.
You should remember that some of the most helpful data could come from both prospective and existing customers. Tools such as focus groups, surveys, and in-person discussions could assist you in understanding what your target market requires. It would be important for you to understand why the customers are shopping with you and what you could do to make your offers more attractive. You could also look at the data from your CRM or POS for gaining insights about your customers.
- Creating market segments and customer profiles
Market segmentation is a process of organizing a group based on several categories such as psychographics and demographics.
- Rest assured that demographics would describe the surface-level and baseline characteristics such as gender, age, education level, ethnic background, and family status.
- Psychographics would dig deep into the people such as values, behaviors, lifestyle, and personality.
It is important to consider both demographics and psychographics when looking forward to conducting a complete analysis of your target market.
- Assessing the competition
Conducting a competitive analysis or using online tools to receive an in-depth view of the competitive landscape. You should also look forward to understanding the businesses offering comparable services and products. It would be inclusive of what they charge and how they do things differently. Unless you believe in having a significant benefit, consider avoiding going after the same customer in a small market where the business of your counterpart is well established.
- Using the target market analysis
After you have completed your analysis, consider putting it to work.
Find below a few ways to using the information for growing and improving your business.
- Product development
In the event your analysis helped identify a few holes in the market, you could make the most of the information for creating services and products required by your target market.
- Niche market
It would be important to identify an underserved population. Rather than going after the same customers as your competitors, consider exploring the unexplored markets.
- Opportunities to expand
While assessing your local market, you might identify underserved areas. Rest assured that this valuable information would help you with adding or franchising a new location.
- Pricing strategy
While assessing your competition, you may come across that you were pricing yourself out of the market or not charge enough. Consider using comparative data for determining a fair price.
- Curation
When you have several options and customers do not like it or you offer several similar items as your counterparts, rest assured to emphasize the best selling exclusive items.
- Marketing
Your marketing strategy should be based on the target market. It would be important for you to determine the channels you should be used for communicating with your customers along with the messages working with them. Whenever you think about implementing something new, be it a social platform or a promotional movement; consider checking the analysis to see if it vibrates.
Running a business is not easy. However, search for a company offering the tools you require for starting, running, and growing your business if you were selling online, in person, or both. They should have their tools specifically designed for working together as one system, saving you both time, money, and making decisions with ease. Therefore, you could get back to doing the work you relish and focus on the future.
