It doesn’t matter if you’re opening up an ice cream shop or if you plan on selling workout gear online; you still need to know who your target market is. As you’ve probably learned by visiting their website, there’s more to understanding your target market than meets the eye. You need to break down who these people are and what their interests are.
What does the target market mean?
Simply put, your target market is who you are going to focus on selling your product or service to. If you’re selling heavy-duty vacuum cleaners, you would target people in the hospitality industry. These are the people who will buy what you have to sell. If you can’t zero in on the exact people who will buy what you’re selling, you’ll never sell any of it.
How do you find your target market?
Well, if you’re selling something people buy online, you find out where potential customers hang out. No, you’re not going to spam them, but instead, you’re going to try to figure out as much information about them as possible.
Let’s say that you’re into the new fad of pickleball, and you want to sell accessories to people who are into the sport as much as you are. The first thing you want to do is determine if pickleball is more popular with men or women. After that, you need to figure out what the average age of pickleball players is. You may even want to try to determine where pickleball is more popular. Maybe more people play pickleball out west compared to, let’s say, the Massachusettes.
You can use Reddit as a means of trying to figure out all of this information. Facebook groups are another place where you might want to look. Facebook is great because you can look at the profiles of people in groups to see who they are. Also, forums are another great spot to find people talking about your niche that you can gain useful information from.
What do you do with this information?
After you identify who your target market is, you can craft your content with them in mind. Knowing who you’re marketing to matters because it enables you to zero in on the exact perfect customer. It’s a waste of time to try to market a product or service to people who will never use it.
You will need to keep the end user in mind when you’re crafting your content or advertising materials. If you’re targeting older women because they’re more likely to plant flower beds, you’ll want to make sure that you use pictures of older women in your advertising or blog posts. It wouldn’t do any good if you showed them a picture of a young man working in a flower bed.
Knowing your target market also allows you to hone in on their pain points. Older women may have a problem bending over, and you can find shovels or other tools that will enable them to work with their flowers without having to suffer from back pain. If you don’t know who your target market is, you’re missing out on a huge audience that you can sell stuff to. Young guys don’t need to worry about their backs, but a grandma is a whole different story because once she gets down, there’s no getting back up.
Don’t make the mistake of selling to the wrong people
It’s hard enough to get eyeballs in today’s world of short attention spans, and it’s even harder to convert them into customers. If you aren’t focusing on a select group of people, you’re really putting yourself behind the eight ball. If you cast a big net, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you’re overstretched and unable to reach the right people.
It’s all about delivering the right product to the right person. If you can do that, the possibilities are endless when it comes to profitability. If you try to market to everyone, you’ll find that your efforts will get lost in the sea of noise of the internet because your marketing is too generalized to get anyone’s attention.