How To Choose Your Target Market

Hi, it’s Rick Nuske here…

Today I want to share some tips that will help you successfully identify your ideal target market.

Firstly, what does the term target market actually mean?

Well, in basic lingo, target market essentially means identifying a particular group of ideal consumers at which your products or services are aimed for maximum profit.

Part of this process includes identifying what is referred to as your ‘ideal customer avatar’ and this simply means understanding your ideal customer in terms of their demographic, geographic, and psycho-graphic information, along with their typical buying patterns, creditworthiness, purchase history and so on.

Do you actually know WHO you want to sell your goods and or services to?

Do you know WHAT your ideal buyer avatar looks like?

When I started out, I made the mistake of trying to promote goods and services to anyone with two feet and a heartbeat. Bad move…and not at all targeted!

The only reason I became aware of this even being a problem was thanks to my mentor at the time. He told me that I needed to stop and really think about who I wanted to go after and once I’d identified my ideal customer avatar, I could write all of my sales materials and so on, such that I spoke directly to them.

The key is to really know your ideal customer…you must know their pain points and what gives them pleasure…you must know what turns them on, and what turns them off. In essence, you must know as much as possible about the people you intend to market to for your offers to be successful.

Here’s the thing. You do not need to create products and services that appeal to the masses. A smarter option is to have a very specific and much smaller target market/niche who will place a greater level of value on what you have to offer them.

Time and again we come back to the need for testing and measurement. In relation to targeting who your ideal customer will be, you can use testing and measurement to find out what might just be the big money maker you’ve been looking to uncover. But without testing and measuring a small gap in your market, you won’t know.

If you choose to be a commodity marketer and try and appeal to everybody, what you’ll find is that you will need a large budget to fund ongoing marketing campaigns in a number of different advertising platforms. Although that’s fine if you can fund it, as a small business discussion site, I recommend niching down and testing for untapped areas of your market to differentiate yourself. In doing this you will find that you have less competition and your idea customer will be able to find you when they’re looking for what it is that you offer.

Testing the money making potential in the market gaps you find is the best way to save time and money. You don’t want to go all in only to find that there was never any money to be made. If you find that there is in fact ‘honey in the pot’ within the niche you choose, then when you scale up, you will be far more likely to attract solid profits.

Who is your target market?

Do you know who you ideal buyer avatar looks like?

I’d love to hear what strategies your using to choose your target market…so leave your comments below…