The success or failure of your marketing strategy can be defined by analyzing your target market. You have succeeded in your marketing strategy if you have converted your target market to customers. You have failed in your marketing strategy if your target market does not pay much attention to your products and ignores the same.
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What is Target Market?
A Target market is a group of population which is of most interest to a business or marketer. It is ultimately this group of people whom you are going to target with your Marketing campaigns. When you are starting a business, there will a number of people who are in mind and who will be ready to buy your product because they either need it or want it. This group of people is your target market. The target market is the complete focus of your current marketing strategy.
A company should have a clear Target market for which it needs to carry out segmentation. This Target market holds your target customers who are most likely to buy your product or services.
However, the key challenge for several marketers is to find your target market. Target marketing is an important step in marketing strategy and comes in the triangle of segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP).
There are two ways to find your target market – A new business might start with a product in hand or with a target market in mind. Thus, an entrepreneur can manufacture a product and then find the target market for the product; or he can find the target market and then form a product. In both the cases, it is important to find a target market which matches your product or service. The article discusses step by step process to find your target market.
1) Know yourself
To find your target market, the first step is Know yourself. The strength of your business and your products, your core competency and what your company can or cannot do. You need to list the advantages of your products or your services and WHY the customer will be interested in your product. The more you know about yourself, the more target markets you can find.
2) Know your competition
The second step in finding a target market is to define the competition. Which are the companies giving direct or indirect competition to you? Which of them should you consider as competitor and which of them should you ignore?.
3) Define your customers
The third step is to define your customers or the profile of customers who will buy your products. This step can be explained with the example of Dominos. Dominos unlike Pizza hut, did not want customers to visit showroom. Its major focus was home delivery. Thus, Dominos by internally researching its capacity and its competitors, could decide the target market. As Dominos had defined his customer as a person who will order his pizza at home, he was clear on his target market.
4) Finding the gap or conducting gap analysis
Once you know your strengths and the strength of the competition, you can easily do a gap analysis. You can know which are the products or services which the customer is getting from you or your competitor, and at the same time, which are the products which the customer needs but they are not being provided by you or your competitor. Thus you have found a target market through gap analysis.
5) Geographic expansion
Another way to find a target market is through geographic expansion. Thus, if your product is being manufactured in Mumbai, it is likely that the requirement might come from Delhi as well. Thus, you are missing out on your target market if you have not expanded your operations geographically.
6) Demographics
Can youngsters use your products even though it is meant for mature people? Playstation and Xbox was made for young adults but surprisingly, even old people love the games as much as young people. Thus, analyse the demographics to find your target market and define who can be your next customer.
7) Conduct market research
Market research can also help you to find your target market. In banking segment, regular market research is conducted to find a target market which will be suitable for the wide variety of financial products.
8) Niche marketing
It is not necessary that you expand only in the mass market. You can expand in niche market as well. However, the niche market will have very specific requirements. By conducting a niche marketing research, you can find the target market which is niche but very much an expandable market for your products.
9) Customer feedback
You can dig deeper in your customer base through customer feedback. Customer’s who are irritated or even delighted with your products can very well give feedback’s to you. These feedback’s can be ideas within themselves to find your target market.
The above 9 steps can help you find your target market and you can answer the question – What is Target market. Can you think of any more steps which come in mind to find target market?
