Who belongs in my target market?

I am a massive, although a recent, fan of Tom Fishburne’s Blog – The Marketoonist… below is one of his cartoons…

As he points out in his blog post, which you can find by clicking on the image, it is extremely difficult to identify your target market. We either create a product and try and find a market to buy, or we pick a market and try and build a product for them. Obviously, the latter is the best way to go, however, it isn’t what normally happens. Even after we have done this, a lot of businesses struggle to actually define their market.

Without a clear and concise target market, all of your marketing will be confused and ineffective. It is very common for a product or business to have multiple target markets. Before you create any piece of marketing material or create any type of sales script, you need, NEED to know who you are targetting.

 So how can you easily, and properly define your target markets… 

First things first, get a rough idea of your different markets. Are they single, overweight mums, or are they, gothic teenagers?

Then for each of those markets, picture the ideal person from that market… Instead of trying to think of your target market as a broad group of people. Try defining them as individual people. Are they male or female? How old are they? What do they look like? Where do they shop? What do they read? What do they do on weekends? Do they have hobbies? What types of social media, if any do they use? Do they read blogs? What is their social status? How much money do they make? What is their education level?  And any other questions that will help your particular industry – ie. PT’s might ask, ‘How many kilos do they want to lose?‘, Makeup artists may ask, ‘What types of events would they need my services for?‘

Now to get it all down so you can actually remember – Either find pictures of your ideal ‘person’, write a paragraph about them from the above questions, pick a song or movie that identifies them – whatever is going to help YOU remember the personality of this person.

You will end up with several ‘personalities’ that make up your target market for your various products or services.

Don’t just leave it at that.

When you do any form of marketing, pick one or at the very maximum two of those people and write the advertisement for them! Make sure that if you do pick more than one that they have some similarities or overlap. What kind of wording would that person respond to? What offers would they claim? How are they likely to contact you?

Having clearly defined target ‘personalities’ will significantly increase the effectiveness of your marketing!