When it comes to maximizing the potential for sales, knowing your audience should be a top priority. Relevant marketing techniques can make all the difference, and understanding your target market can come in handy. Without this type of knowledge, your efforts may begin to feel a little bit like swinging in the dark, but with a firm understanding of the analytical, practical, and demographical audience that your products or services are best suited to, you could quickly find your sales skyrocketing. But what exactly is a target market, and how can you identify yours?
What is a target market?
Typically speaking, a target market is the type of audience you intend to reach to promote your products and services. Let’s imagine that you sell athletic sneakers for a moment. Focusing on pet owners looking for products for their dogs or cats won’t make much sense if this is the case. Instead, your market will relate to those that enjoy exercise, activities, and athletics.
Why is it important to define a target market?
By defining your target market, often referred to as a demographic, you’ll be able to hone in on the types of customers that are most likely to buy your products. It really is as simple as that. Even the biggest brands in the world need to understand their audience, and this is why they will often dedicate a portion of their budget to identifying the key factors relating to the types of people that they want to reach.
Types of target markets
Many types of target markets are usually split into varying categories based on their ages, location, interests, and spending habits. For instance, if we use the example given above, a generalized target market for sneaker manufacturers would be those aged between 11 and 50 as a standard factor. Different sneakers can be designed to suit specific needs, such as walking, hiking, running, or any number of activities, but by eliminating the audience outside of the initial parameters, it can be possible to hone in on those most likely to need what the company has to sell.
Geographic
The geographic location of a target market can also be vitally important. Some businesses may want to focus on local customers, while others may have ambitions that take their efforts to the international stage. It all depends on who you are and what you have to offer. For those that work online, their geographic audience will be international, whereas a local florist will likely need to target an audience a little closer to home.
Demographic
A demographic is a more generalized term for a group of people based on the factors mentioned previously in this article, such as age, location, or even gender. Getting to grips with a particular demographic can be much simpler to focus on their interests and find ways via marketing to appeal to their wants and needs directly. Knowing your demographic can be one of the most important things to consider, or you will be targeting a random market that may bring you sales occasionally but won’t be as focused as possible, which means that your sales won’t perform as well as they could if you were focusing on a reliable demographic.
Psychographic
To go even deeper into research, many marketers will also focus on their specific audience’s psychographics, which loosely translates to understanding their habits, spending activities, or what they like to do in their spare time. This is especially useful for obtaining a deeper level of understanding of how to appeal to the audience as intrinsically as possible.
Behavioral
In addition to understanding the psychographic traits of a particular group of people, identifying their behavioral characteristics can be very important. Factors such as the likelihood to spend at certain times of the day, week, month, or season can be better understood, as can other aspects such as their interests and how they spend their money.
Difference between target market and target audience
You might have noticed that the terms target market and target audience are often interchanged. Although a common practice, there are subtle differences that leading marketers will understand. For instance, a target audience is a group of people that a business will want to reach in an effort to showcase their products and services. A target market, on the other hand, will be a select collection of people that will be most likely to make a purchase. Both can switch between audience and target at any given time, and this is why understanding the key differences between both can be important to enhance sales and profitability.
How to determine a target market for your business
There are many ways to determine a target market for your business specifically, including investing in a marketing specialist to handle the technicalities for you or turning to tools that aid in understanding these types of audiences. For example, Google Analytics is a useful piece of software that can help you to recognize where your customers are coming from, and online tools can assist you by identifying the sort of search terms that they are using to find what you have to offer. You could also negate technology at first by sitting down as a team and focusing on who you actually want to target, and then cross-reference these desires with online tools to focus on the most viable audience.
Target market example
To give you a better idea of a target market, here’s an example and when you’ve finished your research, your results should look a little something like this.
- Product: Sneakers
- Age Range: 16-52
- Location: Southern California
- Budget: $99-$299
- Race: Caucasian, Hispanic, Black
- Gender: All
- Marital Status: Single, Married, Civil Partnership
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