Identify Your Market – Why And How

If you try to market to everyone, you market to no-one.

Your product is “just right” for a section of the overall market – they are the ones who have needs that can be met by your market. But understandably, many people fear missing out. “If I concentrate on a target focus,” they say, “What happens if someone outside that focus also wants it?”

I have a free download for you this week that can help you find your real target market.

Think of it as a game of numbers – how do you find a segment where you have the most chance of finding the customers who are ready to buy your product.

How does that work?

Let’s say you are a financial consultant, and you offer advice on savings. Sure, your skills could benefit everybody. But your market could be split into a number of segments, say:

• People who are young and should start investing;
• People who are married and finding it hard to budget;
• People who are older and have not saved in the past.

For the sake of argument, say there are 100 people in each category that you could reach. If you try to reach the first category, they really are not interested. Yes, they should start saving, but they are really not thinking of it. Of all those you reach out to only 2 out of 100 respond.

You reach out to the second category – and you find that finding it hard to budget is only one of their concerns. In fact, their most painful concern at the moment is looking after teenagers! So out of 100 you reach out to, maybe 20 respond.

Yet, when you reach out to the third category, you find that they are desperate about saving. They realise that they are not far from retirement and don’t have a big nest egg behind them. Their needs are perfectly met by your product. Out of the 100 you reach out to, 90 feel the pain and respond.

That’s why you need to focus on your real target market in your marketing.

Don’t indulge in the fear of missing out – focus on your target market.

The free download will help you if you want to know how to find your target market:

1. Describe your overall market. In the above example, it might be “Anyone who would like to know how to save money for the future.”
2. Detail their characteristics. Think of their demographics like age range (in the above example it might be 18 to 85 because kids under 18 don’t really need to save, and people over 85 probably already have appropriate investments or it’s too late) or gender, geographic location (are you only targeting people in your city?), income range, and so on.
3. Break down the above broad market description and characteristics into logical segments. In the above example, you may have decided in the three categories first outlined above, but you might even be more precise – “People between 18 and 30 and earning between $30,000 to $50,000 who should start saving, People between 18 and 30 and earning between $50,000 to $100,000 who have started to save,” and so on.
4. Then analyse your segments. Which one do you think has most of the low hanging fruit – the ones who have the pain that your solution can remove? Choose your target market and then focus all your marketing activity on them.

Get the free worksheet to find your target market here.

If you want to follow through and discover how to focus your marketing activities on the right market, check out my online video training and workshop program called SMART Marketing.

I have a lot more blog posts about marketing at my website so if you want to learn how to create strategy, provide leadership and grow your business, get to teikoh.com now!

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