How to Understand your Target Market

How well does your business know it’s target market and what’s your commitment to ongoing target market research?

Smart businesses today, focus on utilising marketing strategies that retrieve more information on their customers and prospective customers’ preferences during most encounters. This information capture and analysis is of course a lot more manageable than ‘big data‘ and businesses everywhere, are using it to build and reengineer their products and services so they’re more desirable to their target market.

Better products equals more sales, more revenue and more market share.

Customers have a lot more power at their fingertips today and their expectations are much higher, so when things go wrong, their dissatisfaction can be shared online and a business’s reputation can go from great to poor in next to no time at all.

Therefore when your business commits to ongoing target market research, assumptions can be made to get a better outcome. From a marketer’s position an assumption could be made on how people will react to particular marketing campaign and with less risk, money can be spent and a desirable outcome achieved.

The good news is your business can engage research specialists and Circle B2B research is a business that specialises in researching, tracking and understanding ‘target markets’. Here’s some information for your business on understanding your target market so you too can benefit from knowing more about your prospective customers and your business.

Deciding on a Target Market

Odd as it may appear but some businesses don’t know their who their customers are and where to find more – i.e. they don’t know their target market.

So the first task is figuring out a Target Market. Best to start with the make up of your existing customers i.e. their demographic which may include; age, gender, hobbies, annoyances, salary etc.

Now you’ll need to carry out extensive research on your chosen Target Market. Using Google Trends is a great way to start to find out what people are searching for, what type of words they use and when they are doing their searches.

This information will allow you to begin your journey of understanding your Target Market.

Getting into the Mindset of a Customer

What is the mindset of a typical customer of your business? It’s time to step into your customers shoes so imagine you are a customer of your business and answer these questions:

• What would you want to see when searching for a product/service?
• What would put you off a company or product?
• How would you use search engines?
• How would you find the product/service?

With your answers you select a broad target market your business. Of course honing it will come over time and using a specialist research team will speed up your intel. gathering and analysis.

Incorporating your new-found knowledge

Ongoing marketing campaigns created with content aimed at getting a response from the Target Market will enable you to draw conclusions and make assumptions on their future behaviour particularly their buying patterns. Just like in normal sales, the customer is always right. In this case, you must predict what the customer wants before they know they want it.

In essence all you have to do is learn how to get into the characters of your chosen Target Market and use that knowledge, in addition to other information you have gathered to improve your business’s desirability.