If you’ve successfully turned your killer business idea into a reality by putting in long hours, congratulations! However, your work isn’t done yet. You need to introduce your product or service to your target market. While it’s relatively simpler to develop a campaign for the masses, devoting resources and time to identify your target market is the key to maximizing the marketing ROI.
The goal is to create personalized but targeted experiences for people whose attention you’re looking to grab. This is the only way to stand out among a sea of brands. Having a comprehensive understanding regarding your ideal buyer can help make more informed decisions concerning the message, timing, and media that must be used to tap into your desired set of audience.
Ensuring that the right message is delivered to the right people at the right time requires the identification of your target market. But first, let’s clarify the difference between two widely confused terms often used interchangeably in marketing: Target Market and Target Audience.
The Difference Between Target Market and Target Audience
A target market refers to a set of consumers a brand plans to reach via marketing activities to sell them the products or services. A target audience is a segment or group within the target market that’s being catered to by marketing campaigns and advertisements. It’s more or less a specific subset of the target market.
Ways to Identify the Target Market
Determining the target market isn’t as simple as guessing who the potential clients are or inclining towards a specific demographic. It requires a detailed review of your offerings, current or potential customers, the marketplace, and more. Here are some tactics to help you determine your target market.
#1 Analyse Your offerings
The first step is to analyze the problems your services or products solve before identifying who they appeal to. For instance, if you’re a nutrition foods business, your services would be attractive to health enthusiasts, and more specifically, people who are too busy to make their own healthy meals and can afford to buy them. This implies that your target market would include high-income persons with demanding healthcare concerns, children, or jobs, who don’t have time or energy to cook nutritious meals from scratch but still want to improve their health.
#2 Conduct Market Research
Determining the target market goes way beyond a simple understanding of your customers. Having a deep understanding of the marketplace is equally important. Using several analytic tools can help you get a comprehensive view of the landscape by assessing and identifying competitors, enabling you to identify areas of improvement, and helping you find new customers.
Many cutting-edge tools available in the market also provide data like local consumer spending in the category or other nearby companies that offer similar services. These tools are also helpful for finding local demographic information like income, household size, education level, and more.
Not to mention the helpful insights you can get from competitive analysis and prospective plus existing customers. Tools like focus groups, surveys, and in-person discussions are excellent for understanding what the target market needs, ways to make them shop with you or make your offerings more appealing. Data from CRM and POS can also be used to glean insights about the customers.
#3 Market Segmentation and Consumer Profiling
Market segmentation helps organize a group based on various categories, like psychographics and demographics. These categories help describe more baseline characteristics and surface-level details, such as gender, age, ethnic background, education level, and family and marital status. Other insights about psychographics can offer deep insights concerning people’s personalities, values, lifestyle, and more.
If you own a business related to natural specialty products, you may be wondering how to expand your capabilities among consumers and reach the target market effectively. Considering the traffic in markets across various industries today, it’s best to divert all your focus towards producing premier quality products to meet the consumer demand gap. Leave the worries regarding sales to Natural Consumer Packaged Goods consultants at emerge.
By choosing the right CPG & Natural Products Sales outsourcing agency, you can streamline success for your natural specialty company. We’re known as one of the best Natural foods sales consulting companies with extensive experience working with a wide range of natural consumer packaged food brands. Our goal is to help brands understand and excel in their primary category when providing them with an efficient sales channel for the market.
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