How to Define a Target Market

Defining the target market is crucial when developing any product or service. A product's target market consists of segments of society that could be potential customers. Such people often desire such products because they are useful for what they do or appeal to them in other ways. For example, if you are developing a revolutionary type of pencil that is all about comfort, its target market would include people that write a lot. This could be students, engineers, artists, and more. The target market drives marketing decisions for a business. It can help you choose which mediums to market and advertise your product and how to reach potential customers effectively.

Customer Segments

You need to consider four main categories when determining your target market: demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral.

A consumer's demographic comprises age, income, gender, occupation, and more. Psychographicsegments take this further and consider the consumer's lifestyle and interests. In addition, you also need to look at the geographic relation of the customer. If your product is sold only in one of your brick-and-mortar locations, members of your target market need to live in a reasonable range of the store. If your primary selling method is online, you need to consider where you ship. Behavioralsegmentation is quite different but still equally important. It focuses on the purchasing decisions of consumers and the factors that influence them. This data can be collected from past customers for similar products or by conducting a marketing research study.

Steps to define a target market

Defining a target market for your product or service can be broken down into a few key steps:

1. List all of the main features and facts about your product or service.
2. Consider which groups within the customer segments (demographics, psychographics, geographics, and behavioral) your product or service would appeal to.
3. Rank these groups according to how likely they would purchase the product or service.
4. Based on your ranked list, the top few groups would be the best groups to include in the target market. You can narrow it down to just two or three groups or include upwards of four – it is all dependent on the marketing resources available to you. However, it's essential to note that it's better to put your effort and resources into creating specific marketing content for fewer groups than surface-level marketing for many.

Takeaways

• Defining a target market for your product or service is critical to fully understanding your product and boosting your marketing efforts' effectiveness.
• Consider a potential consumer's demographic, psychographic, geographics, and behavioral aspects when developing your product and defining the target market.
• Including fewer groups in your target market is better to avoid doing a mediocre job when marketing to numerous groups.