Defining Your Target Market

The Importance of Defining Your Target Market

Your target market dictates everything from your website design to your choice of social media channels, to the types of ads you run, and so on. Your specific customers may also vary for each different service you offer through your business. For example a Martial Arts studio would market to different people for MMA classes versus Kids Karate. In MMA the target market tends to be 18-25 year old males where as Kids Karate is often the parents, and specifically the mom’s of children ages 7-14.

At the end of the day if you don’t know who you are marketing too specifically you decrease your chances of reaching them. Defining your target market and ultimately your specific buyers is critical to meeting the right people at the right time.

Buyer Persona

A Buyer Persona breaks your target market down to individual buyers. Who is your customer exactly? A persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves. 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 buyer’s needs and expectations. So your Buyer Personas are our ideal customer. You want to list specific details about the person who will likely make the decision to buy your product or service.

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

Marketing Triggers

Once you have narrowed down your target market and build buyer personas defining 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, and targeted, rather than arbitrarily pushing out messages to big audiences.

Now What?

What is a qualified lead? Who are your target customers? You need to define the criteria that helps you determine an ideal lead from a bad one. We like to create an Inbound 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 this plan you do keyword research on your target customers, define what channels and social media platforms they spend their time on, and create a detailed action plan that 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.

If you aren’t sure where to start and want some help we would love to be there for you. We’ve worked with hundreds of small businesses and are always looking at new ways to help them grow their business!