I made the same mistake that a lot of first time internet business owners make. We think we want everyone to be our customer. In reality, we only want the people who can benefit from our products, who will understand the value of what we are offering and buy from us. These people are our target market.

What is a Target Market?

A target market is a group of people, usually defined by a set of demographics such as age, gender and location, who are most likely to buy your product or service. Put another way, these are the people who will run into, or are already dealing with, the problems that your product solves.

For example, you’re a web designer who sells custom made websites. Your target market would be people who want a professionally designed website. Now that’s a pretty big group but one that gets narrowed down according to the characteristics of your products. If you do site design at a low price point then you’re going after people who want budget friendly design services.

When I started my internet business, I had heard that blogging was a great way to attract customers and I jumped in with both feet. I believed that by providing useful information, I could kill two birds with one stone; draw in customers and demonstrate my skills. However, I did not identify my target market and instead just began dashing off post after post.

But, because I didn’t define a target market, I ended up picking a topic for my blog that was both too general and too competitive. As I learned more about marketing, I eventually realized that while I was aiming in the right direction, I was shooting too wide with the result being a lot of wasted time and effort attracting people who didn’t need my services.

How to Define Your Target Market

Since I already had a product to sell, I needed to do a little reverse engineering in order to identify my target market. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down my service offerings; content and SEO article writing. I then determined the type of problem I solved for the people who hired me. I saved people time, money and aggravation by providing them with informative articles that targeted their audience and were optimized for the search engines.

I had chosen blogging as the topic of my blog but the problem was not all bloggers hire content and SEO article writers. The majority of personal and professional bloggers create their own content. My target market was people who ran websites that needed constant updating but didn’t have the time, knowledge or inclination to create that content themselves. This meant online magazines, affiliate marketers and serial niche builders.

Now that category is still pretty broad and I’ve since narrowed it down with the type of writing I do as well as the price point where I sell my services. When identifying your target market, you don’t have to hit the bull’s eye on the first try. As long as you land somewhere close, you can then fine tune your customer profile until it matches your product offerings.

Questions for Identifying Your Target Market

To get a general idea of who your target market is, ask yourself the following three questions.

• What does my product do?
• How do people use my product? Or what problem does it solve?
• Why type of person or company would need what my product does?

Like me, you’ll probably end up with a large group of people. To trim it down, apply some demographics to your target market.

• What gender is more likely to use my product?
• What age group would find my service useful?
• Where does my customer live? What type of place is it? What are the people like who reside there?
• What economic resources are available to my target market? Who can afford to pay for my product or service? This question is especially important if you are selling luxury or high priced items.
• How often would they need my product or service? Knowing this will help you price your product accordingly.

For highly specialized products, you want to get even more specific:

• What type of lifestyle does my target market live? Are they environmentally savvy? A jet setter? A stay at home mom?
• What are their religious views?
• What are their political views?
• How savvy are they with technology?
• What stage of their life are they in? Are they retired? Just graduated college? Experienced a job loss?

The internet is very useful for finding information on your target market. The more specific you can get, the more targeted your sales message which, in turn, means more sales conversions. In a follow up article, we will talk about how to use the information you gain to market to your ideal customer.

Peace and Prosperity

(photo credit: MrBill)

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