It is not uncommon for small and medium size business owners to assume that their product will appeal to a very wide range of people if not to everybody.
The reality is usually very different. If you think about a local convenience store based in Swindon, although the products on sale are quite generic, it still has a specific audience. The owner of the store would be unlikely to be selling newspapers to folk in Glasgow.
No one sells to everybody, there are always some terms that narrow down the field.
Now this is quite an essential piece of thinking where marketing is concerned because you really want to be spending your marketing budget on a campaign or activities that will really make a difference to your turnover. It makes sense therefore to use your money communicating with those people who are most likely to spend their money with you.
It is a false economy casting the net wide; it will not bring you in any more customers but is likely to be much more expensive. We hear regularly from well meaning business owners that marketing doesn’t work. They have spent a lot of cash on advertising or websites but have had no increase in customers or sales. We invariably discover during our discussions that actually the marketing activity in question seldom, if ever, met with their target audience. It would be like advertising multi-million pound properties in the Swindon Advertiser. Rarely would a house buyer with that sort of money, scroll through the property pages of a local paper, they would however look in the Country Life Magazine or on its web site.
So we need to be thinking less about marketing being a spend function and more about how we can gain more customers and more sales though identifying the right target audience. We need to make our marketing budget give us more bangs for our buck which we do by identifying our target market.
Once you know your target market, then and only then ,can you deliver a focussed marketing campaign which will tell your customers and potential new customers about your product or service in a compelling way and in a language that they understand and in a format that they will readily engage with.
Ok that said let’s take a look at the 5 steps to defining your market. You will see 2 diagrams with examples, one for those businesses that sell direct to consumers or individuals and the other for those who sell to other businesses. They are similar but the slight differences may be of help.
Five Steps to Defining your Market…
Foundation Tip 1 - Customers
Foundation Tip 1 - Business
