Knowing Your Target Market
This week I want to talk about your target market. Knowing your target market is very important and necessary in order to successfully market and advertise your business. You could start your business and say I’m a shoe company, I offer everyone shoes to put on their feet. Or I’m a photographer, I’ll do a photoshoot for anyone who asks. But that’s extremely broad and you can’t possibly market efficiently and effectively to everyone everywhere all things. Most business ideas have niches or categories that you can narrow down and zone in your efforts on. You’re a shoe company but you mainly sell baseball shoes or cross-country track shoes. Or for photography, you can take any kind of photoshoot but you want to focus on senior portraits or automotive photography at car meets because that’s what you excel at. If your business is successful with that specific group of people, then you can then expand and offer more categories, more products, and/or more services.
The reason you want to start small is to generate a clear path and growth plan. Starting small and then expanding not only makes business easier but also allows you to focus your money where you will get a more solid return. Instead of shooting in the dark, you’re creating a target, a place for your arrow to land. You’re not just trying to find a needle in a hack stack. Your money isn’t just going everywhere hoping to land somewhere. You need to focus your skills and efforts on the area you’re good at or can truly help rather than trying to be everyone for everyone.
When creating your target market, you want to think of several things. Where are you located and where will your target market be located? What income class are you shooting for? How old is your target market and what age range is your product for? Does gender play a roll in your business? What other attributes does your target market need to have? For my start up client, ArboVe, our target market looks something like this: Health conscious and active men and women, between the ages of 21 and 35, from Charlotte NC and surrounding areas. That’s not to say we exclude people outside of those classifications, but that’s the people we’re shooting for and think our product will benefit the most. Our product may be good for elderly people trying to reach their daily nutrition goals and still be active in their everyday life. We can still serve them, but our advertisements won’t go out towards them because they’re not the niche we think we’ll succeed at the most.
Once you know your target market, its important to immerse yourself in their interests if you’re not already part of your target market yourself. You must be one with your target market. That line might be overused and cliché, but its so true. Join Facebook groups your target market would be in, not to advertise your product but to learn what they’re looking for, going after, and how to further satisfy and market towards them. Go to event or gatherings where your target market is going to hang out or be apart of. Read the same books, magazines, articles, etc. as your target market. You want to fully understand your people.
Once you’ve established your target market, done your research, understand them and know how your business relates to them, then you can create effective and efficient advertisements. If you advertise on a social media platform, you then know the types of hashtags you need to be using, where you need to be posting and what you need to post. Also, several paid advertisements through websites and social platforms will ask you the demographics and details of you target market. Many of them allow you to select age ranges, locations, genders and more. Knowing your target market then makes all this and advertising to a group that will actually buy, soooooo much easier. It all makes more sense. Establishing a target market is a key element to business that may seem small but have major impacts.
If this blog was helpful to you let us know! If you have any other marketing or business questions, feel free to ask those and contact us. If you enjoyed this blog, stayed tuned next week for another weekly blog. Have a great day!
