How to Define and Analyze Your Target Market
Understanding your target market is crucial to your business success
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A vital component of any successful marketing campaign is having an in-depth knowledge of the market you’re trying to target.
The time and effort invested in identifying and learning about a market will pay dividends when making real connections with potential customers or clients.
These four tips will help you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your market to more efficiently direct your marketing efforts.
1. Why location is important to target marketing
The location of your target market may seem obvious, but it nevertheless needs to be clearly defined before you can proceed with formulating a winning strategy.
Consider where your market would naturally operate. If your customer base is likely to be based within your local area, it usually is quite easy to define its boundaries.
However, if your business operates partly or wholly online, the location of your target market may be more difficult to pin down. Consider the websites and forums that your customers may frequent and make yourself aware of any relevant digital communities that may exist.
The online location of your target market is equally as important as the physical placement is for a traditional shop so take the time to figure out where your potential customers reside.
2. Why socioeconomics matter in target markets
Once you know where your market is located, you need to research its socioeconomic makeup. Your potential customer base’s financial status will help you decide upon price-points, and their spending habits can shape your marketing techniques.
The product or service your business provides must be compatible with the socio-economic outlook of your target market. If it isn’t, you will struggle to make a consistent profit.
Use statistical research to ascertain the market’s potential disposable income and the results of online surveys to discover their spending habits and traits. How a market spends its money is as important as the amount they have to spend. With a wealth of socioeconomic information, you can tailor your product and its marketing more efficiently and take advantage of the prevailing societal conditions.
All of this to say that your target market may be defined by isolating one or more groups of users by running a market segmentation.
The results could inform your business strategy from marketing to product development as you respond to these unique user groups’ specific needs.
3. Opportunities in target marketing Online Communities
Each market can consist of any number of individual communities. A key component of comprehensive market research is identifying those groups and their relevance to your brand.
Social media is often a great place to start researching market communities as users naturally separate themselves into self-identifying groups.
Peruse as many different sources as possible to create a list of different communities and divide them by their individual demographics and characteristics. When it comes to launching a marketing campaign, the more nuanced information you have at your disposal, the more accurately you will be able to tailor your efforts.
4. How to analyze your target market with brand tracking
Identifying trends is an important element of market research and should be ongoing. Purchasing habits change as communities develop and society evolves, so staying informed is imperative to your success.
The best way to stay abreast of any developments is conduct on-going feedback surveys or brand tracking studies with users and relevant communities. The simple act of interacting with your target market will enable organic exposure to any natural trends.
The key to exploiting patterns is to:
- Act quickly upon the information you receive, so stay alert and be adaptable.
- Assess each trend on its own merits and consider how it could be relevant to your own product or service.
Defining a target market is a crucial part of business development that has a lasting effect on profitability and growth. By dividing the process into these four elements, we find the benefit of compartmentalizing the steps into segments that are easy to manage and review.
The process doesn’t need to be difficult, and a business with a well-defined and researched target market will have a far greater chance of success than one without.
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Jim Whaley
Author
Jim Whaley is a business leader, market research expert, and writer. He posts frequently on The Standard Ovation and other industry blogs.
OvationMR is a global provider of first-party data for those seeking solutions that require information for informed business decisions.
OvationMR is a leader in delivering insights and reliable results across a variety of industry sectors around the globe consistently for market research professionals and management consultants.
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