Title: Target Marketing: What Is It?
Headings: Target Marketing: What Is It?
Target Marketing: What Is It?
If you build it, they will come.
What is target marketing?
Identifying your target market: Who, what, why, how
Who: Demographics
Where: Geographics
Why: Psychographics
How: Behaviors
Researching your target market
At the bare minimum, these are the things you should know about your target customers:
How businesses can use target marketing
Beat your competition in niche markets
Case study: The wireless industry
Build a loyal customer base
Case study: Sephora
In conclusion
Michael Kerr
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Content: Who, what, why, how
Identifying your target market is part of business planning—notice that it’s planning as an ongoing action not just writing a plan as a one-time event. Gathering information about your target market, like business planning, shouldn’t be an exercise you do once and then never revisit. For as long as you are in business, you’ll always need to be thinking about how to better understand your ideal prospective customers. One of your first steps in starting a business (or growing one) is identifying your market— the subset of the population who need and will pay for what you’re selling. Think of it this way: if your business idea is to revolutionize fashionable hiking shoes made from ethically sourced materials, it can be tempting to think that your target market is everyone with feet. But realistically, the people most likely to purchase your shoes probably share some similar characteristics: they’re fashion-conscious but prioritize comfort over style. They would rather buy something that lasts for 700 miles than 200, even if it costs more. You can make some hypotheses, like that because of your price point, college students are less likely to buy them than people in their mid-thirties, or that people who live in areas where hiking and nature are easy to access are more likely to buy than people in dense urban areas.