Every business has a defined target market that’s best to pursue. However, many new business owners may not know exactly what a target market is or how to go about identifying one.
Here we’ll get into the definition of a target market and give you some tips for finding yours as you attempt to appeal to new customers.
What Is a Target Market, Exactly?
A target market is a specific audience that a business will want to target based on the products or services it offers. You’ll want to connect with this target market through visuals and messaging in your marketing that resonate with them, and each target market will respond differently to various marketing efforts.
The people who make up your target market will consist of people that fall under certain demographics, psychographics, and other defining characteristics that set them apart from other audiences. If you can gain a deep understanding of this target market, you’ll be able to hone your marketing and other efforts to build and maintain relationships with new customers, whether this entails advertising online or writing helpful blogs and other content.
While you may be able to appeal to people outside of your target market, you should have a unique audience in mind that’s most likely to respond favorably to your marketing strategies. The key is knowing how to find your target market.
How to Identify Your Target Market
If you want to locate your specific target market, take the following steps:
Learn About Your Existing Customers
You can get a start on identifying your target audience by analyzing any existing customers you have. Learn certain things about them, such as how they heard about your company and offerings, their unique pain points that your offerings solve, and their demographics. You can obtain this information from surveys, social media interactions, and other channels that help you get to know your customers better.
Using information collected from these customers, you can begin segmenting your audience and identifying markets worth targeting with your marketing campaigns.
Look at Competitors
Find out what kinds of customers your competitors attract. You might find that competing businesses are using certain messaging to appeal to a particular market. In fact, you may discover that your competitors are going after segments you didn’t even think to target.
Also, you can see what kinds of features or benefits your competitors are pushing. In the process, you may find ways to better position your business or differentiate yourself with unique selling points.
Look into Existing Market Research
With a better idea of the kinds of people you want to target with your business, you can also do some external research into this market. There are plenty of sources for market research out there for you to turn to, including McKinsey, Pew Research Center, and Gartner, to name a few. These and other resources publish many reports that can give you insight into your prospective audiences and their interests.
Additionally, you can conduct keyword research in your industry to determine what kinds of things your audiences want or need from you. For example, you might find that people are looking for solutions to specific pain points that you can help alleviate with your offerings. In these cases, you might want to shift your marketing to address these pain points and show up for relevant keyword terms in search engines with good search engine optimization.
Build Buyer Personas
One of the best tools to use for pinning down and understanding your target market is a buyer persona. This is a fictitious representation of a specific target audience.
You would start by gathering as much information about your target market as you can find, including demographics, psychographics, and interests. Using this information, you can paint a picture of the average member of this target audience. From there, you can put together a composite in the form of a character who represents the audience.
For example, a business might target single parents who are busy and trying to balance work and parenthood. This buyer persona could be “Parent Pat,” which is easy to remember and categorize. Other segments might have different representations. Personifying each audience will then help you gear your marketing and advertising efforts to this particular personality.
Get Help With Identifying and Reaching Your Target Market
While taking these steps may help you find your target market, you might not have the time, resources, or experience needed to get the most from these efforts. If you need some assistance with locating and connecting with your target market, consider turning to the experts at Kore Media. We can incorporate existing and new research to help you identify your most viable customers. In addition, we can help with every aspect of your marketing campaigns to reach these audiences with resonant messaging.
If you would like to get started on finding and reaching your target market, contact us today to discuss your needs.
