The Importance of Defining Your Target Market

Your target market dictates every single aspect of how your business functions.  From the creation of your website design, your choice of social media channels, the various ads you run, your presence on search engines, etc.; depends on your target market. Your specific group of potential customers may also vary for each of the different products or services you offer within your business.

An example of defining your target audience would be if a Martial Arts studio were marketing to different people.  For example, offering services for a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) class versus a Kids Karate class. In the MMA class, the target market demographic tends to be 18-25 year olds; whereas the market segment for Kids Karate is often geared towards the parents who are the consumer; specifically towards the parents of children ages 7-14 years.

The point here is that if you don’t know specifically who you are marketing to, you significantly decrease your chances of successfully reaching them. Defining your target market, and ultimately your specific buyers, is critical to meeting the right people at the right time.

Defining your target market is also your best opportunity to improve your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)  so that you can drive more website traffic and qualified leads through your landing page.  This will allow you to successfully increase conversions, or drive potential buyers through your conversion funnel.

Buyer Persona

A Buyer Persona breaks your target market down to individual buyers and narrows down exactly who your customer is and who you are serving. A persona tells you from a specific perspective, what customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options in order to address a problem that your company resolves.  This process is a key element to complete before you start working on any business funnel.

A buyer persona is not merely a description of your buyer. When you have insights into what your buyers think about doing business with you, you have the knowledge you need to adjust your inbound marketing activities to meet your buyers’ needs and expectations. Overall, your Buyer Personas are your ideal customer.

To create your buyer persona, you want to list specific details about the person who will likely make the decision to buy your product or service. These are known as buyer persona templates.  We like to go so far as to create a fictional stereotypical profile of this person – complete with name, age, gender, family, title, company role, interests, skills, goals, and attitude.

The more detail to add to these templates, the better. You review this on a regular basis to make sure that your marketing actions are consistently directed towards the relevant needs and desires of these potential customers.

Marketing Triggers

Once you have narrowed down your target market and built buyer personas to define your ideal customers, you need to start and identify the events and pain points that cause them to search for information about your product, service, or industry. These are often known as marketing triggers.

Marketing Triggers aim to meet potential customers at a point of need by being reactive (or trigger based), and targeted, rather than arbitrarily pushing out messages to big audiences.  These are also a big part of your product development process in order to give consumers what they need and create more opportunities to increase conversions for your business.

The Before & After

This is where we dive deeper and begin focusing on the desired aspects of your potential customer before using your product or service and after they have purchased and used your product or service.  This is such an integral focal point of transformation; whether it be a physical or an emotional change.

As marketers, we strive to accurately articulate exactly what your product is and how it shifts or transforms consumers into the ideal state of being.  The message is amplified to propel action from the consumer, just like a marketing trigger.  This shift is where we can really spend time to understand and prioritize this concept in order to effectively define your target market.

Take Action

What is a qualified lead? Who are your target customers? What is your desired action for the consumer?

You need to define the detailed criteria in your marketing automation that helps you determine an ideal lead from a bad one.

We like to create a Digital Marketing Strategy and Action Plan that will refine these profiles over time and paint a detailed picture of who our customers are, what they want, and how we can best serve them at each stage in their sales process. Within the inbound strategy plan, you will conduct keyword research on your target customers, define what channels, landing page, and social media platforms they spend their time on, and create a detailed call to action plan of content marketing.

This marketing campaign outlines what, when, and how you plan to market to them. Then you analyze it regularly, keep doing what works, throw away what doesn’t, and report frequently so you can make constant adjustments.