When small businesses can compete with larger enterprises for the same audience, to know how to define your target market is essential to don’t waste time and money.
To get the expected results, you can never be generic with your target market.
To know the target market definition is as important as to have clear business goals. If you try to achieve a broad audience, you will need a bigger budget, which may not worth it.
In the same way that if you don’t know what you want, you will get nothing.
This complete guide will drive you to the best way to know how to define your target market. Here you will find out what you have to do, like:
- 1. Compile the data of your current customers
- 2. Look at social media analytics
- 3. Understand the problems your company helps to solve
- 4. Think about niche markets
- 5. Use specific marketing tools
- 6. Test your target market
Keep reading and maximize the results of your business!
6 tips to define your target market
1. Compile the data of your current customers
Your audience spreads clues in a lot of touchpoints and channels where they pass. They are telling you what they want all time so, to listen to them, you have to turn this data into organized information.
What are they buying? How much are they paying? What are they asking? Where are they searching? What are they saying in social media? What are they reading in your blog? What are they watching on your video channel? With which publications are they interacting the most? And, the most important, who are they?
All these answers are valuable psychographics, demographics, and behavioral information about the audience in that target market. It will help you to know what do you have to offer to your target market and how do you have to do it. Get it to build your strategy!
2. Look at social media analytics
Social media analytics goes beyond to see what your audience is doing. It is an important tool to take a look at all markets, including your competitors. You don’t have to limit your analysis to your own social media. You can expand it to all market players.
From this analysis, you can get valuable information for a benchmark, for instance, and to adopt the best practices in your market to earn new customers.
And, speaking about clients, social media analytics helps you to understand their behavior and, consequently, to know what you have to do to enchant them. Try it and you will have a good surprise!
Bellow, we will list some of the best of them:
- Facebook Analytics
- LinkedIn Analytics
- Instagram Analytics
- YouTube Analytics
- Twitter Analytics
- Pinterest Analytics.
3. Understand the problems your company helps to solve
If you understand which are the pains of your clients and the needs of your target market, you can shape your service or product to offer the best solution to solve their problems.
Knowing these problems, and especially how to solve them, you will be able to satisfy your target market and know how to have effective client communication with your audience, to let them know what you can do to help them.
You may use the collected data to fill some business model generator such as the Value Proposition Canvas that will help to organize the information.
4. Think about niche markets
Apply your creative thinking skills to find the best niche markets for your business. Some of them offer a lot of new opportunities for you to explore all capabilities that your company has and find out innovative solutions to offer.
Some kinds of niches fit into the blue ocean strategy. It means that you can come to a space of the market where no one ever was and shape this niche in your own way. You will create the rules in this new niche market.
Some details are very needful, so you should analyze them with care. Know some of them:
- Make sure that the target market niche has enough people to keep your business up.
- Verify if these people have money to buy your service or product.
- Analyze if their purchase is recurrent, it means, if they buy repeatedly.
- Know your competitors and study how they work.
- Find your differentials for the act in this niche market.
5. Use specific marketing tools
The best way to understand your target market is by knowing the public inside it. To do it, you should use specific marketing tools such as Google Analytics. There are a lot of others, one to each channel, and the data that you can collect with them will bring you valuable insights to help you know how to define your target market.
6. Test your target market
Once you have an idea of which may be your target market, it is time to test it. Defining some metrics for content performance, for example, you may have an overview of the needs and problems in a certain market.
Following the way your audience interact with each content, you will find out if your solutions can solve their problems or not. And, mainly, which market your business better fits in.
As you saw in this post, to know how to define your target market is as important as to have clear goals for your business. Besides that, if you follow simple tips like the ones you had read here, you will get better results as you never had before. So, what are you waiting for?
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