Every digital marketer and business owner needs to understand their target audience to succeed. Who are they marketing to? What do they need? Where do they like to hang out, and how do they want to be communicated to? Answering all these questions and more is crucial for every entrepreneur who wants to thrive in their business.
Moreover, understanding your target market enables you to attract and engage with your audience in the right way, to build and establish a long-lasting relationship that leads to repeat sales. Without understanding your target market, it would be difficult to know where to find your prospective customers, what they need, and what to do to make them your customers.
On the other hand, your inability to know these cripples your digital marketing strategy and ultimately impedes your sales growth. Therefore, this article will explain what a target market entails and why understanding your target market is crucial to achieving your goals as a business. It will also provide a step-by-step process for understanding your target market.
What Does a “Target Market” Mean
Your target market is a group of people your product or services are targeted at. For example, they are people you wish to sell to or those who are likely to use your products and services. Your target market isn’t all the “fish in the sea”; they are specific types of “fish” that need what your business or product has to offer.
For example, as a fashion brand, your target market could be women between 25-50 years. This means as a women’s fashion brand, your product isn’t targeted at every woman; instead, it is for women within that specific age bracket. However, people often confuse a target market with a target audience; so, let’s do a bit of clarification here.
Although your target market and target audience have to segment the market to define who your product and services are targeted at, they are pretty different. A target market is a group of people you want to sell to; your target audience defines this group based on their demographics, psychographics, interests, and more.
It is important to note that both the target market and target audience work together to help every entrepreneur reach their marketing goals.
Why Do You Need to Understand Your Target Market
Understanding your target market is the key that opens the door to more sales, increased engagement, and better relationships with your customers.
How does this work? Find out below:
1. To Help You Craft a Suitable Marketing Message
Understanding your target audience means you know who they are and what they need. It also means you are aware of your customers’ interests, so you can communicate the right solutions to your audience in the way they like it.
For example, as an interior decorator, you know your target market’s primary concern is beautifying their house and making it look more attractive to live in. With this information in mind, you present your service as a solution to that need, which persuades them to patronize you.
Understanding your target audience makes it easier and more effective to communicate and market your products and services to potential customers to get the best results.
2. To Help You Target the Right People
Without a clear understanding of who your target market is, it would not be easy to make sales as a business. Moreover, you will keep marketing your product and services to those who don’t need them, which frustrates your marketing efforts.
However, by understanding who your target market is, you know where to find them and how to place your product and services right in front of them. Also, you will know the right things to say to get their attention and engage them, and you will surely know how to convince them that your product and services are the best for them.
Thus, understanding your target market gives you a clear-cut perception of the right people to market to. For instance, every family member uses kitchen utensils, but those who buy them are most likely mothers.
This means although you can market to the entire family, it would be more effective to market to mothers as they are often the ones who make the purchase decision.
3. To Help You Save Time and Money as a Business
Understanding your target market is cost-effective and saves you time. In addition, you get to avoid spending tons of money on false advertisements, promotional offers, and other forms of marketing strategies.
You won’t have to go around in circles while trying to make sales and grow your business because understanding your customers facilitates the sales process and your growth as a business.
How to Understand Your Customers in 4 Easy Steps
Now that you know what a target market is and why it’s essential to understand your target market. Let’s discuss how to understand your target market using these four straightforward steps.
1. Examine Your Product or Service
To understand your target market, you must understand your product first and understand the type of product or service you render and the value it gives your ideal customer. So, first, identify the gap your product or service fills. Then, how does it help your ideal customers, and how does it make their lives better?
After this, you should identify your ideal customers’ challenges. For example, what stage are they in their lives, and what current problems do they have? Then, how do your product and service address these challenges?
The next thing is to identify the most profound advantage of your product. This is often referred to as your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), which is your product’s or service’s unique benefit to your consumers.
If you’ve already launched your product and service and you have an existing customer base, you should consider conducting a user survey to find answers to these questions. Again, your customers are likely to give you practical solutions you can work with.
By evaluating your product and service, you gain deeper insights into your target market, their problems, and how your product or service can help fix these issues.
2. Analyze Your Competitors
Analyzing your competition is crucial to understand who your target market is.
According to the Crockett Law Group, an Orange County personal injury law firm, analyzing and mimicking what your competitors are doing is the fastest way to grow your business online in the beginning.
The best way to do so is to conduct a competitive analysis. Such analysis involves identifying who your direct customers are in your industry and evaluating their customer base.
So, find out who their customers are, how they interact with their customers, and how their customers interact. Next, figure out what your competition marketing strategies are and which methods work best on their customers.
Analyzing your competition gives you insights into who you should be targeting, your target market’s behavioral habits, as well as the strategies to employ to attract and engage your target audience.
More so, conducting market analysis helps you identify specific loopholes in your competitors’ marketing strategy to use to your advantage. Tools like Attest’s market analysis template can help you perform practical competitive analysis on your best results.
3. Segment Your Market
It’s necessary to segment your target market to get the best results where your target audience comes in. So first, segment your target audience from your target market by splitting your prospective customers based on their demographics, geography, and psychographics.
Segmenting helps you streamline your target market to your buyer persona- that one customer that represents other customers. When segmenting your target market, the factors to consider include age, gender, location, income, interests, beliefs and values, lifestyle, and behavior.
Finding your ideal customers based on these factors helps you understand your audience better. As a result, you have a clearer understanding of your specific audience and the best ways to connect with them.
Furthermore, segmenting your market helps you classify your market, as it is possible to have different types of audiences in the same market. For example, your target audience as a SaaS company can range from the CEO to the HR team, marketing team, and so on.
All these departments have different needs; therefore, segmenting lets you attend to their specific needs separately rather than use a one-size-fits approach.
4. Conduct Research
It’s necessary to conduct further research using market research tools like SEMrush to understand your customers better. Here, you will examine the most suitable marketing strategy to adopt for specific audience types in your target market.
A marketing strategy could range from content marketing strategies to social media strategy, lead generation, and more. The idea is to find the best approach to engage your target audience to get the expected results.
After you’ve conducted research, you should identify your marketing goals and set a timeline to reach these goals. Then, put the right strategies in place to ensure your goals are achieved.
Conclusion
Knowing your target market is the key to running a successful business. It gives you insights into who your audience is and how to attract and sell to them so you can reach your sales goals as a business.
This article discussed what a target market is, the benefits of understanding your target market, and explained how to understand your target market with a straightforward guide.
Follow the step-by-step guide to understand your target market and achieve the best outcomes with your marketing efforts.