Defining your target market.

Who’s your target market? Do you know?

If I asked you, could you draw a picture of them? Could you tell me what they eat for dinner? Could you tell me for whom they voted in the last presidential election?

Don’t worry…most small business owners couldn’t.

But when it comes to developing your brand, developing your marketing plan, developing your marketing and advertising materials…just about anything that has to do with your business, or product/service…not knowing who you’re trying to sell to is like shooting in the dark. You’re bound to hit something after awhile, but it’ll cost you a lot of time and bullets.

So if you haven’t already, now’s a great time to ask yourself, “Who’s going to buy from me?”

Ask the right questions.

Zeroing in on your target market really isn’t hard. It’s simply about asking the right questions.

I like to divide the questions up into three groups: 1) questions about your product/service, 2) demographic questions, and 3) psychographic questions. If you take time to answer these properly, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who your target is.

Product / Service:

Is your product/service local, regional, national, or international in scope?

What do your customers generally spend on the product/service category?

What do your customers like best about your product/service?

Demographics:

How old are they (range is fine)?

What’s their gender?

What’s their marital status? How long have they been married, divorced, single?

What is their educational level?

What’s their household income (HHI)?

What’s their ethnic and religious background?

Psychographics:

Where do they live?

What do they drive?

What movies do they watch?

What music do they listen to?

What car do they drive?

What’s their lifestyle? Are they conservative, liberal, trendy?

What do they do in their free time? What are their activities and interests?

What are their attitudes and beliefs?

What’s their ethnic and religious background?

What are they looking for out of life? What are their values?

Basically, anything you can think of that defines who you are, ask it about your target.

If you’ve been in business awhile, you can find the answers to these questions by asking your sales force, or by just observing you clientele. If you’re a new business (or if you want to dig deeper) you can contact a market research firm who can conduct surveys, focus groups, and online searches for you. You can also consult business directories, obtain statistics, and surf the web for articles to aid in the process.

Give your target a face.

Now obviously, not everyone in your target market is the same. But you’d be surprised at the number of similarities you’ll find.

So by now you should see a picture emerging of your target market (or who you would like your target market to be.

And now for the fun part:

Giving your target market a personality. This is actually called “customer profiling.”

Take all the information you have accumulated from the above questions and create a persona – or personality - for your brand.

Seriously. Do it.

I’m not kidding.

You’d be surprised how this will help you put a face to your brand and to your target. I’ve had clients go so far as to give their “brand persona” a name (like Gloria, Gidget, or Henry), and assign them a face and body.

For example, say you sell kayaks, and you determine your target audience is male, 24- 40 year-old college grads, with a HHI of $75,.000+. They love outdoor adventure and extreme sports. Your brand personality paragraph might read something like:

Target:

“Josh is an 35-year-old adventure-loving male who likes to try new things and feels at home in just about any situation. He is college educated, with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, and makes around $85,000 as the assistant marketing director at a midwest ad agency. In his spare time he likes to take his wife and two kids camping and hiking. Josh doesn’t really like to go to movies, but likes to rent action/adventure movies that he can watch with the kids.”

If you wanted to give him a face, Josh might look something like this photo.

Some of these can get quite elaborate, but I would keep it fairly simple and top-line. The point is create a feeling of who your target market is so your marketing and advertising materials can better connect with them.

I hope this page has been helpful and insightful. If you would like more information on advertising , marketing , brand strategy , or any number of other topics, please click on the links above or below.

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