How to Effectively Define & Outline Your Target Market

Why Even Define Target Market & Audience?

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When starting a business most people believe that they can reach everyone with their products/services, or that everyone is a potential customer; sadly, this is far from the case. 

Rather than thinking you can appeal to everyone, everywhere, it is important and vital to the success of your business to effectively target, communicate, and track who your customers are and where they are coming from. Defining a target audience and market is crucial to creating a lasting brand and increasing your ROI with your marketing. 

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What Problem Are You Solving

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Before being able to effectively market your products to the right people, you must have a clearly defined problem that your product or service addresses. Think about this: How can you solve the problems of the people you want to solve without knowing the problem you want to solve? If you are having trouble thinking of identifying your specific problem, think about the solution that your product or service offers. Once you know WHAT value you bring you can then begin to target who needs it.

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Target Market vs. Target Audience

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Target Market

Firstly, it is important to understand the key differences between a target market and a target audience. A target market is the customers that you want to target, which could be women ages 18-35 who live in the United States or men over 50 who have boats. Target market is the overarching term that moves you closer to finding your target audience.

Target Audience

The best understanding of a target audience is to imagine it as a subsection of the target market, is the specific geographic, demographic, and psychographics (these terms are discussed below in the article in more detail) characteristics of your target audience. Understanding these customer profiles and market segments will allow you to effectively advertise directly to the people who are most likely to buy your products/services. Furthermore, you will also be able to build a better relationship with your customers because this will allow you to decide on your language, tone, and content.

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Current Customer Base

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Your current customer base can be a great starting point to understanding which people are buying your products/services. Companies can actually assume they have perfectly defined their target market and are pushing advertisements and using valuable company resources on groups that are not even buying their products. You can see how this is a problem? Tracking and analyzing your current customers can be a great way to know and understand your target market. You can find out valuable information– What demographic do they fall into? What are their buying habits? Are they a defined target market/audience? Using this data, don’t be afraid to reach out to your customers through surveys, focus groups, and/or in-person discussions, to find out how your products/ services are working for them.

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Look At Competitors (Not Illegal)

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A great source of guidance for determining who you want to target is looking at competitors. Watching and analyzing your competitors' customer base allows you to target niche groups and effectively market to those underserved groups. There are great (free!) tools out there like the U.S. Small Business Association’s SizeUp tool, Google Trends, and SimilarWeb that allow you to track the trends and habits of both your and your competitor’s customers. These insights can allow you to better define and create a more defined audience and niche marketing strategy.

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Niche Markets

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A niche market builds onto an already established target market. Your target market could be women between the ages of 20-35. However, let’s say, for instance, that you operate a clothing brand aimed at plus-sized women between the ages of 20-35, that would be a more defined, niche market. Defining niche markets also allow you to create content and advertisements across different platforms that relate more to your target audience because you have defined who they are which allows you to communicate in a style that would have the most impact and engagement. You can also have different niche markets for different aspects of your brand. Having multiple defined markets allows you to target different sectors of your defined market which increases your ROI instead of putting out content that may hit the simple majority of your market (maybe about 50-60%), you can put out content that relates to more people within your defined market. Take a popular brand like vans, for example, they have sectioned their overall market into particular niches by even having separate Instagram accounts that target that specific demographic. 

‍Understanding Your Audience Geographics, Demographics & Psychographic

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Defining your target audience and market geographics, demographics & psychographics are some of the key indicators and metrics that should be used when properly defining your market. In the chart below I have listed the key parts of each. Demographics are basically the things that make up what your target customer is on the outside. Each aspect of demographics is important in your marketing plan, but some of the important questions to ask when defining demographics are: What Does my target customer look like? And Can they afford my products/services? However, demographics don’t paint the full picture of your target customer. Let’s say for example you have defined that your target market is college students, you can probably assume they don’t have much money, live on campus, are between the ages of 18-25, and are either single or dating. Now, at first thought, this would be a sufficient enough definition of your market; however, let’s say you own a sports energy drink company that you are looking to sell to that demographic and you choose to market to them. However, you have forgotten to take into consideration why most people do what they do– psychographics. Why do they do what they do? Yes, your target demographics may be defined, but marketing to those students who aren’t even interested in working out or fitness would have a far less ROI than defining and assessing the psychographics of your target market and marketing to the people who would want to buy your products rather than convincing people to take up a new lifestyle.

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Track your Results

At the end of the day, defining your target market sets the foundation of everything you do towards marketing your product; however, the next key step is tracking your customer. In the marketing world, data is king, and begin able to track, gather, and analyze your customers will allow you to see what’s working and what’s not. Using services like Google Analytics and Social media business account trackings information you can track the engagement on your posts and advertisements. These things will help you answer questions like: Are your customers coming back? Are you in the right market? Are you getting engagement from your target audience? So get tracking!

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