One important component to a strong business model is not only identifying what the offering will be, but also who the product or service is most directly geared toward.
Understanding who the target market is from the start will help business builders make wise decisions in other areas of business growth and maintain consistent interactions with clients, partners and investors. The more defined a target market is, the easier it will be to make the tough decisions down the road.
Having a clear image of the key demographic and psychographic qualities of your target market and understanding the benefits they will derive from your products and services will help your employees better understand how to keep these ideal clients happy and engaged.
Can you define your target market?
Clear Definition
The increasingly competitive marketplace is making it difficult for companies to stand out from peers to acquire new prospects and to engage existing clients. Therefore, it is vital for business builders to define a target market so that all marketing, sales, client service, and branding decisions are made based on whom communications are intended to reach and how they are intended to nurture a prospect or engage a client.
If a financial advisory firm is looking to offer retirement guidance for young families or wants to target middle-age adults nearing the end of their working days, it will create dramatically different campaigns to connect their target market with the company on multiple channels.
As younger prospects are more comfortable with modern technology and communication tools, channels such as social media are easily embraced by the demographic. Older generations, however, may prefer more traditional communication portals and are uncomfortable or nonresponsive when touched online or via social media.
Defining the target market not only helps align the business decisions to create a consistent presentation, it also helps business builders decide which channels to use initially when reaching out to drive sales and build long-term relationships.
When defining a target market, we recommend looking at your current client base to get an idea of what demographics and psychographics stand out from your ideal client profiles.
You want to be specific. Pick at least 5 demographic and 5 psychographic qualities that make up your ideal client profile.
It is also important to review what problem your product or service is looking to solve, and consider what type of individuals commonly encounter these concerns and would benefit from the offering.
The easiest way to sell something new is to showcase why it is important to have it, and why going without the offering can make things worse for the individual. Therefore, the people who could get the most out of a transaction should likely makeup the core of your target market.
Head to the second part of this blog post to dig deep on how to understand the preferences of your target market population and optimize market awareness.
