What You Need to Know
How do I identify my target customers?
Your first job when profiling a target market is to be able to identify precisely who your audience is. Can you accurately describe the characteristics of your ideal customers? Which clients currently spend the most with you? Why do they do this? If you don't know the answers, you need to find out.
You'll probably already have a good idea about the groups of people or types of businesses that you think you can sell your service to. For individual customers this might be people of a certain age, gender, socio-economic status, occupation, or a group with common or special interests such as sports or hobbies. For business customers these might be located in a specific area, or in a particular sector, or could have similarities in terms of the customer groups they sell to.
Your objective should be to concentrate your marketing on these groups of people, businesses, or existing customers who are most likely to buy your product or service. Doing this in the most profitable way takes experience, but once you have identified this target group of people or businesses, you'll have completed the first step in profiling your market and now have your list of target prospects-your ideal customers.
Don't forget that you could also speak to your existing clients or, even better, clients of your competitors if that is possible.
Double Check that Your Marketing Message Is Right for Your Target Market
Once you have spoken to a sample of your target market and you are satisfied that you have confirmed your assumptions about their needs, you'll be in a position to create or adapt a marketing proposition to sell the benefits of your product or service to that audience. After you have established the basic proposition, consider carefully whether there is anything further that will make your marketing message even more appealing. Will these communications convince them that your service can provide the benefits that meet their exact needs?
Check that Your List of Prospects Is as Precise as Possible
Your prospects list will only be of real use in your marketing campaign if it accurately reflects the profile of the audiences you are targeting. Have the consumers of your product or service been identified in terms of their geographic and demographic profile, their employment status, profession, special interests, membership of clubs, and so on? Have you compiled a list of your business targets in terms of where they are located, their size, names of the main buyer, repeat purchase rate? Have you identified the best sales channels to enable you to reach these target customers?
Your sales efforts can only be as good as the list of prospects you have selected in your target markets, and that list must reflect the profile of the audience you are developing your marketing proposition to reach.
Insure that You Are Giving Them What They Want
With a thorough understanding of the needs of your ideal customers, you should then strive to create an offering and proposition based on four criteria that will give them:
If you are not convinced that your sales proposition meets all of these criteria, then you'll need to study the profile of your customers again and revise your offering.
Is it about quality or quantity of prospects?
A precision-driven marketing approach-where you have a high-quality list of prospective clients or leads-will, dollar-for-dollar of marketing spend, prove far more productive and profitable than an untargeted blanket approach to generate sales.
Quality of leads, based on your understanding, knowledge, and careful profiling of your customers and their needs, will massively increase your ability to convert them into sales.
Pinpoint what Your Customers and Prospects Need or Want
Having selected your ideal customer groups you'll now need to be absolutely clear about what they want and need, and exactly what it is that you are going to offer them. This understanding will enable you to develop the specific marketing message and proposition that will most effectively sell the benefits of your product or service to them.
If you get these messages wrong, then it's almost certain that your marketing efforts will fail, as your customers will buy from your competitors instead. Your product, service, or business proposition will have missed the target completely.
Speak to Target Customers Before Developing Your Marketing Strategy
Before you start to develop or choose your marketing strategy it's always worthwhile to speak first to a sample from your target audience. By doing this you'll be able to check that your profile of your intended market has been the right one, and test your assumptions about what you think they want and why they could buy from you.
You could do this by speaking directly to a group of people or you could undertake a survey in the form of a questionnaire, which can be mailed to a sample of target customers. Alternatively, you could talk to passers-by in a location that is frequented by your ideal customers.
What to Avoid
Failing to Test
The most common mistakes made when targeting products and services toward specific users or customer groups are caused by not testing the assumptions you have made about your audience. You'll waste valuable time and marketing budget if you launch a campaign toward an audience when you have not accurately identified who those customers are, and cannot precisely define what they want and why they could buy from you instead of your competitors.
Lack of Focus
Do not buy into a list of unknown prospects, no matter how attractive it seems to get names of thousands of people you can blanket-sell to in the short term.
Find out who they are, where they are located, and test your assumptions about what you believe they want. By testing, you can either confirm that your profiling was right, or you can adjust your offering until you get it right. Being precise will lead to more sales more quickly, and more profit over the longer term. One book you might find helpful when learning to sharpen your focus is The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow your Focus, Dominate Your Market by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, published by Perseus.