How businesses can define their target market

Struggling to make sales? James Cashmore outlines the essential steps to finding the right audience for your business.

Every business owner dreams of landing a huge client base and making incredible sales. However, if you find yourself constantly falling short of making sales, it might be time to check who your product or service is targeting. 

The essential first step to any successful marketing or lead generation strategy is to know who your target market is. This way, you will be able to customise your marketing message to speak personally and directly to the people or businesses who are likely to be your customers.

Your target market will have a need or desire for your business offering. They will also have the budget to afford it.

Getting started

Creating customer profiles is a great way of organising the different types of people or companies who make up your target market. During the process of creating customer profiles, you may discover that your business has a variety of different customers; all with different needs and different spending habits. 

It is common to find your business has a particular type of customer who spends the most amount of money with minimal effort on your company’s behalf. These are your high-value customers and are the people and businesses who should make up your target market.

The best way to start creating customer profiles and discovering the characteristics of your high-value customers, is to examine your business’s current customer base. Here you will find real data that correlates your business with your target market. Doing this is much easier if you are an established company that utilises a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. 

Your CRM will collect and store plenty of demographic information that you can use to start grouping your customers and look for trends. Demographic information includes details such as age, location, occupation, salary and education.

Look at their purchase history

Once you have grouped your current clients based on their demographic information, you can then start looking for trends in their purchasing history. Find which customers spend the most money for the least amount of effort. 

From here, you’ll be able to add the details of their buying journey to your customer profile; information such as the length of the sales cycle and where typical points of pain or hesitation exist along the way. This information, combined with demographic correlations, will equip you to create a marketing strategy strategically created for your customers.

Confirm your findings

You now have a base of information organised into customer profiles. It is a good idea to confirm the trends you have discovered and the easiest way to do that is to find out directly from your current customers. Customers generally don’t mind taking surveys, especially if you offer something small in return. You could also give them a quick call, which will provide you with the information you seek and also shows great customer service.

Take this opportunity to ask them what they like about your offering and your company, and also if they have had any bad experiences. Find out what they would keep, what they would change, and what they would like to see more of in the future. If this is done properly, your customers will think you are offering great customer service as opposed to fishing for information.

Complete your customer profile

You now have all the information required to put together a customer profile that defines your target market – demographic details, buying trends, insights into their needs and desires, and problems that you can solve.

From here it will be much easier to put together an intelligent and thoughtful marketing campaign that will speak directly to your customers. This means you will spend less time and energy trying to please everyone and instead, you will attract more of the right customers – the customers who will be loyal to your company and spend more for less effort.

If you are a new company and do not have a current customer base to examine, defining who your target market is will help you avoid making costly marketing mistakes that could damage your brand even before you get started. Lead generation agencies like Lead Express can help you get started.

See https://leadgeneration.com.au/ for more information. James Cashmore (below), is CEO and Head of Strategy at Lead Express