Every business needs to have a market to sell to. Of course, we’re all part of a bigger, worldwide market, but these are just the numbers that tell us what people are buying and who they’re mainly buying from. In more specific terms, every single business has their own cut of the market, in which they’ve found an audience that responds to their marketing, recognises their brand, and will keep on coming back for more.
And that’s where you come in – you’re yet to get to this stage, aren’t you? Whether you’re someone who works from home as an entrepreneur, or you’ve made it far enough to open up a store or a physical office location, you’ve still got a bit of digging to do in order to truly find your target market, and the people who would be more than happy to buy from you for years on end.
After all, a business builds most of its success off of repeat custom, and for a company like yours to build a loyal fanbase, you need to find the people who will truly appreciate you. So, without further ado, here are some of the best ways to pinpoint and lockdown your true target market.
The first thing to do, in order to work out where your target market resides, is to define what your dream customer would look like. You can do this in a variety of ways, but most of all, you need to take the people (or person) who makes you the most money overall and figure out who they are and what makes them tick.
Because it’s more and more people just like them who are going to ensure your profits margin comfortably outdo your costs margin. Your current customer base is a prime example of who comes to your company with commercial wants and needs, and you need to chase them down and work out who they mingle with and/or represent.
How do you do this? By creating a marketing persona based on them. Use both physical and mental factors here: age, gender, ethnicity, occupation and income, as well as their personality, their values, and their hobbies. And before we finish here, you can also do this by watching your competitors with a keen eye…
What Are Your Competitors Up To?
Speaking of, if you’re looking to build a bigger, more diverse and lucrative market for your business to sell towards, you need to know who you’re really up against. Not only for how you should price your products, or what you need to offer that’s different or better than them, but to see how they bring people through their doors. You could very well use the same methods very effectively!
Because when you know how the competitors do it, you know the industry standard, and you know (right down to the fine details) what it takes to break away from this mold and/or do it differently. In finding and building the ideal customer base, this is key – be different to be good, and really stand out from the crowd, as that’s what catches a customer’s eye in this fast paced, digitally based modern world.
Look at the Overseas Market
You don’t have to limit your market research to your own country; it’s a good idea to think a little wider and throw an international net too. After all, even as a small or home business, you can have customers from all over the globe, and if you’ve got enough in a place that’s foreign to you, it’ll be worth it to open up your company to taking orders from them. Sometimes the people who can support our business aren’t quite on our doorstep, and it’s worth it to even just have a quick look of what’s going on in foreign markets.
It’s even quite easy to take care of the financial side in this situation too, so you won’t have to worry about that as you cast your net a little bit wider. For example, if you’re living and working outside of the UK, but you’ve identified a lot of customers or potential customers in the UK, opening up a gbp bank account would do wonders for your books. It’s a lot easier to take payments in their original currency – removes a lot of the hassle of conversion, which can ultimately lose you money in the long term.
Evaluate Your Target Market
Once you’ve figured out who you need to sell to – in terms of where they’re from, how old they are, and what they do during the day, etc., you’re going to need to evaluate just how effective your target market is as a way to make money.
One of the main questions you need to ask here is this: Are they big enough? Is the size of your target market appropriate for your business needs and goals? Ultimately, can you reliably make money off of the people within this small section of the global stage, and turn over a good annual profit because of them?
If your answers to these questions are less than satisfactory, your main option here would be to rethink the product or service you offer, or how/where you operate. A little restructuring within your company and you could have a target market that’s two or three times the size of your original one. And thanks to just how versatile a modern company can be, this shouldn’t be too hard to do as long as you’ve got the time on your hands.
So, What Do You Really Need to Remember?
Your target market is made up of a few general factors: age, location, occupation, gender, etc., and it’s finding the right combination of these factors that’ll ensure you’ll be in business for years to come. Take the time to do your market research properly, and don’t be afraid to dig deeper and deeper into the numbers presented before you.
