Know your target market

I’m sorry to have to tell you, but not everyone in the population will want to buy your product!

Your target market are those people or businesses whose needs are addressed by your product or service.

Hopefully, when you developed your business, product or service, you knew exactly who it was you were targeting.

But it is still worth doing this exercise to clearly focus on and understand your target. That way you can tailor your marketing and sales efforts to them. Not only will you save money and time, but also be a lot more successful in your endeavours!

If you know your targer market well, you should be able to write a short profile of your target customer.

Using our insurance broker as an example. Their target market could be individuals with homes worth over £500,000. They tend to be high earners. They read The Times, Guardian and Observer and typically work in professional industries. They lead a good lifestyle, regularly take several holidays a year and tend to have an interest in art and antiques. Many have second homes abroad.

Your profile might be more detailed or specific than this depending on what you offer. And you might have customers that fall outside your target profile. Of course this is fine! But a well defined profile will help you target your marketing efforts much more effectively.

The best tool I can offer you here to help you do this is to provide you with some questions. Go through them. Some will be irrelevant, but all will help you focus on who you are actually targeting.

When you have answered all you can, you should be able to build a focused profile of you target market.

You may well have more than one target market. Do a profile for them all. The marketing activity you carry out will (and should!) be different for each group.

Go from target market to the my-marketing-team home page.