Since you are the business owner, you will know when to minimize costs and move forward because you have established your company from square one. You have figured out the things that can either be a waste of time for your business or help increase your revenue. Establishing a solid marketing strategy will enable you to maintain financial stability and improve your online presence.
To build a successful business, you must immediately identify your target market rather than go for paid advertisements and discounts. It enables you to understand your customers profoundly and ensures that you create an effective marketing campaign. Your target market only includes some people worldwide. Surprisingly, your target market may be only some of the people.
What is a Target Market?
The target market is related to the group of people who would like to invest in your products and services. Since this is a term you will hear in the business world almost daily, you must pay attention to it. If you initially identify your target market, you can customize your products to meet your customer demands and ensure that your limited advertising budget is only specified for those who will benefit from what you sell. Here are the most common factors you should consider while identifying your target audience:
- Demographics: Personal information about your customers (age, marital status, gender, employment status, income)
- Geography: What is the location of your customers? (Remember that your customers can be from a different continent or living in your neighborhood)
- Psychographics: What are your customers' motivations? What are the issues that they face in their daily lives?
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Understanding your target market is better than making assumptions about it. It is all about identifying their needs and motivation. For example, demographics, such as age, gender, income level, and employment status, will help you determine your customers' needs and how much they can afford to spend.
Apart from their professional life, it would help if you also learned how your customers are in their private life. Learning about their lifestyle and habits during their spare time will help you understand your target audience deeply.
Benefits of Target Marketing
Target marketing enables you to connect with your specified audience directly. Businesses with different types of clients usually face marketing challenges when they use marketing campaigns to connect directly with potential customers. For example, you may need help convincing many people to buy from your brand website. However, breaking them down into segments will help you prioritize those interested in your products and services.
Target marketing also helps you to attract high-quality leads for your business. When you get to the right audience segments, you will likely get leads that will convert into potential customers. Remember to retain your existing customers while looking for new prospects to boost your online sales.
Steps to Identify Your Target Market
1) Analyze Your Offerings
Since you are a business owner, you must ask yourself how your offerings can impact your target market. You can ask yourself how your products and services can solve your customers' problems and to whom they appeal. For example, let's say that you own a landscaping business. Your products and services will attract homeowners with lawns or people who need help taking care of their yards but can pay someone else.
Hence, your target audience will involve adults with demanding jobs and children who may need more time to take care of their lawn but still want it to look good.
2) Conduct Market Research
When you define your target market, it is about more than just understanding your customers correctly. It is all about doing in-depth research on the marketplace. Analytics tools, such as Quantcast, and Google Trends, provide you with a comprehensive view of the landscape. These tools identify and assess your competitors, identify new customers, and help you figure out ways to improve.
Apart from that, you can also check out US Small Business Association's SizeUp tool. As you can imagine by the name, it allows you to size up the competition in your market. It provides data like other relatable businesses that provide similar services and local customer spending.
You must also remember that some valuable data come from existing and new customers. Getting involved in surveys and in-person discussions can help you determine your target market needs. You will find out why customers have trusted your shopping website and how you can make your offerings more attractive.
3) Create Customer Profiles and Market Segments
Customer segmentation organizes a group of people based on different categories, such as demographics and psychographics.
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As we discussed previously, demographics are related to the personal attributes of customers, such as age, gender, income, employment status, etc. On the other hand, psychographics provides a deeper understanding of the people, such as their behavior, lifestyle, mentality, etc. It would be best to consider both factors while thoroughly analyzing your target market.
4) Monitor the Competition
In today's digital world, you are not the only respective player in your field. Many competitors in your niche are striving for excellence. Hence, you must conduct a competitor analysis to get an overview of your competitive landscape. What are the businesses that provide similar offerings as you? How much do these businesses charge for their products and services? Are they implementing any strategy that is different from yours?
Unless you have a significant advantage over your competitors, you shouldn't invest your energy going after the same customer. This approach is even more relevant if you belong to a small market where your competitors have established businesses.
5) Target Market Analysis
Once you have completed your target market analysis, it is time to put your data to work. Here are some ways you can use your information to grow your business:
- Product development: If your research has helped you identify holes within your target market, you can use this information to produce products and services that cater to the demands of your target audience.
- Niche markets: Have you identified some underserved members from your target audience? Instead of investing time and energy going after the same customers as your competitors, you can focus on the untapped markets.
- Expansion opportunities: When monitoring your local market, you must initially identify the underserved sections. This information is valuable if you are trying to prioritize franchising or adding a new location.
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- Pricing strategy: When you analyze your competitors, you will realize that you are either pricing yourself out of the market or need to put higher prices on your products. The comparative data will be ideal for determining a fair price for your offerings.
- Curation: Sometimes, customers may feel frustrated if you provide them with fewer options regarding a product. If you provide the same offerings as your competitors, you can pare down your inventory to prioritize exclusive items.
- Marketing: Your target audience should be the building block of your marketing strategy. You must use the best tools to determine the ideal channels to communicate with your customers and determine what messages work for them. When you have decided to implement something new, such as a promotional campaign, you must check your analysis to see if it resonates.
Rely on Strikingly for Your Business Plans
Once you have identified your target market, you must build a professional website that caters to the needs of your target audience. Strikingly is the perfect website builder today that enables you to build your website within a few hours. Building a website on our platform can be done without technical expertise in website development. Being a business owner, it is easier to build a webpage without writing a single line of code.
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The best part of building a website on Strikingly is that you can do that without investing a single penny. Once registered on our platform, you will be involved in our free plan, which enables you to build an essential website with all the fundamental features. Strikingly is ideal for all beginners and newbies needing help meeting the financial requirements of hiring a professional web designer. We provide our users with ready-to-use website templates, which can be easily customized according to their business plans. Building high-quality websites on Strikingly will enable you to compete with more prominent brands in your niche. Hence, relying on Strikingly allows you to build a website that looks attractive to your target audience and is equipped with powerful tools.
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Once you have established your website, you can start implementing promotional strategies to attract worldwide audiences. You can use different social media platforms to spread your marketing message. Moreover, you can focus on your search engine optimization (SEO) to boost your Google rankings and increase your online presence.
Conclusion
Once you have gone through our guide to target market and its way of identification, you will understand where to look for target markets. Moreover, you will learn how to build a target market strategy using real-life examples. It would help if you established a business by attracting and keeping a loyal customer base. However, you must remember that identifying the right customers is the first step. Once you have understood the main attributes of your target audience, you must shift your focus toward the communication channels that these audience segments can use.
Google Analytics is one of the best ways to determine the behavior of your target market. You can use this data to streamline your marketing strategies across social media channels, traditional advertisements, and email campaigns.
Strikingly is an ideal platform to capture your audience's interests. Apart from focusing on the tone and language in your messages, you can build high-quality landing pages on our platform to attract audiences worldwide.
