Defining Your Brand’s Target Market
Who is your target market? Is it your current customers? People you want to become customers? Perhaps it merely includes everyone that is exposed to your product? These descriptions are all wrong for their own reasons, but the most important being that they are all extremely vague. A business needs to have a specific target market if they are to craft a brand and identity that speaks directly to the desired customer.
Businesses today cannot merely advertise to everyone and hope for the best. Blindly advertising a product has become far too expensive. Instead, companies need an extremely specific target market and a well thought out strategy that reflects the needs of the defined target market. Consumers need a brand that they can connect with and a message they can get behind. Crafting such a message can prove very difficult when you plan on broadcasting it to a large number of people. But creating a target market helps businesses narrow their audience and present a more genuine message, and therefore more useful on a specific group.
How do you Determine your Target Market
There are many methods which businesses use to define their target market, but there is no one formula. How businesses define the target market varies by the context of their situation and the resources available. It often requires a good amount of research and data to be collected to form a well thought out definition of your target market.
A Few Ways to Collect Information on your Target Market
Current customers: Nobody knows what the customers want better than the customers themselves. You want to take into consideration their insights and opinions, listening to them can offer valuable insight as you narrow the definition. If available, they are one of the first sources of data you should tap into. The kind of data you collect from customers varies by your method of acquiring the information.
Primary data: This data is collected by your business through research such as observational studies, interviews, and experiments. It has a high cost, but as the research is managed by your business, it tailors to your exact situation. However, before collecting primary data, search for secondary data because another company may have already carried out their own research that relates to yours.
Secondary data: This is data about the market that already exists, such as customer feedback, government data, and data of previous sales. It is often low in cost, but you run the risk of gathering information that does not pertain to your situation and therefore cannot be used.
Market segmentation: There are four main categories that you can separate customers into, Geographic, Behavioral, Demographic, and Psychographic. Try to identify common categories that fit your customers. Segmenting your market into these categories reveals a pattern in your customers that can be utilized by your business.
Competition: Observe your competitors. What steps are they taking to define their target market or how have they already defined it? While your definition should not be an exact duplicate of your competitor’s, it will be similar because you are fighting for control of the same market
Examples of a Target Market
Say for example that your business is introducing a healthy new candy bar that provides an energy boost because of the many vitamins and nutritious fats in the ingredients. Here are a few examples of what a target market description might look like:
- Good: Physically fit 19-24-year-old men and women who consider working out to be a priority in their day and therefore eat nutritious food, such as a protein bar, before their workout routine.
- Good: Health-conscious Moms with children ages 7-16 who give their kids nutritious snacks during the day.
- Good: Businessmen ages 40-50 who have very little time to eat a complete meal during the day and rely on hearty snacks for substance.
- Needs work: People who want to have a sweet candy that is a healthier alternative than the average candy bar.
- Needs work: Adults who want to lose weight.
Notice how good examples have clearly defined a group of people and a particular need they have which the product will satisfy. Without a well-defined target market, it would be challenging to know who you should advertise the new candy bar product to. Remember that defining your target market helps eliminate resources wasted on people who never turn into customers. Narrowing the audience, you expose the business to allows for a higher profit return at a lower investment.
The Next Step: Developing Personas
While it is not covered in this article, developing a Persona is possibly the most essential method businesses use when it comes to being extremely specific with their target market. Using Personas mitigate wasted expenses and maximizes utilized resources. Stay tuned for more information that walks through what Personas are and how they are used.
