Oh Where Oh Where is Your Target Market @?

Target Marketing – Definition:

Target Marketing involves breaking a market into segments and then concentrating your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments.

Target marketing can be the key to a small business’s success.

The beauty of target marketing is that it makes the promotion, pricing and  distribution of your products/services easier and more cost-effective. Target marketing provides a focus to all of your marketing activities

I started off this post with the definition of  Target Marketing because I was listening to a small business owner make  a presentation in front of other entrepreneurs about the cost of advertising and buying a full page ad to attract more business.  Never once did this business owner talk about their marketing plan or who their target market is.

When I looked at this business owner’s industry and their market, I deduced that no amount of print ads was going to increase their sales to make a positive ROI. The business owner has several large corporate competitors that was already controlling major shares of this business owner’s market.  Plus the business owner product was not carried everywhere the competitors was. The business owner couldn’t beat them with ad page buys.  But what we did uncover that by specializing and focusing on several key influence markets and using a combination of marketing tactics the business owner could increase their sells and increase their distribution.

No one marketing platform by itself was going to do the entire job because the key influencers in the selected markets respond to different stimuli. Some parts of the market will respond to how-to-videos showcasing the best uses of the product and real life testimonials of the benefits.  Others in the market will respond to hands on demonstrations while still others will respond to the social media aspects of having a dialogue with the company.

Growing your business is dependent on you identifying a niche market that have a want, need, desire and can afford your product/service. Once you have located and researched that market as to what stimulus they respond to then you can craft a marketing plan.

Buying ads is NOT a marketing plan.  Creating Social Media profiles is not a marketing plan.  Spending time and money on the next hot Social Media platform is not a marketing plan. And most important Social Media marketing by itself is not profitable for your business. No matter how much you invest in Social Media if you are not using other marketing channels to market your Social Media sites then no one will find you.  Social Media is very reminiscent of the early days of the Internet when companies learned that to drive traffic to their websites they had to participate in offline marketing.

How Do You Identify Your Target Market

This information should be in your business plan and I suggest that you take out your business plan and review it to see if there have been changes to your target market and what adjustments you should be making.  If this information is not in your business plan then here is some information to get you started. Additionally the Small Business Association(SBA) has  good tutorial on Target Marketing

Step One – Identify Why A Customer Would Want To Buy Your Product/service

The first step in identifying your target market is understanding what your products/services have to offer to a group of people or businesses. To do this, identify your product or service’s features and benefits. A feature is a characteristic of a product/service that automatically comes with it.  However, remember to focus more on the benefits as to the features. People buy the benefits not the fancy features.

Ask Yourself:

• What products or services are my competitors not offering that I could offer profitably?
• What competitive advantages do I possess that my competitors can’t offer customers even if they wanted to?
• What do my competitors offer that I could improve on?

Step Two: Segment Your Overall Market

It’s natural to want to target as many people and groups as possible. However, by doing this your marketing strategy will never talk specifically to any one group, and you will most likely turn many potential customers off. Your marketing budget will be much more cost effective if you market to one type of customer and speak directly to them. This allows you to create a highly focused campaign that will directly meet the needs and desires of a specific group. Again, this is called market segmentation.

Step Three: Research Your Target Market

There is a lot of secondary data on practically every market segment to assist you with identifying the behaviors and stimulus of your target market.

Once you have compiled all of your data then you will have enough information to plan a marketing course of action choosing the marketing tools that will speak to your targeted audience at a cost that will provide a positive ROI.

Always look the best blend of marketing tools not the latest and widest reaching tools.  I end this post with my favorite definition of marketing

Mar-ket-ing (n) Definition from Investopedia Commentary

Many people believe that marketing is just about advertising or sales. However, marketing is everything a company does to acquire customers and maintain a relationship with them. Even the small tasks like writing thank-you letters, playing golf with a prospective client, returning calls promptly and meeting with a past client for coffee can be thought of as marketing. The ultimate goal of marketing is to match a company’s products and services to the people who need and want them, thereby ensure profitability.