Identify Your Target Market

This is not by any means a definitive, all-inclusive crash-course in marketing. Successful marketing is a complicated business science that takes years of education and experience to learn.

However, if you are having difficulty identifying your target market, this may help focus your ideas and give you a starting point. Create your own flow chart or diagram like the one below, listing all possibles within each group, progressively narrowing your list down.

Even large corporations with huge advertising budgets use target markets. This is because they know targeted marketing usually produces a better success rate by marketing to a clearly defined segment of the population, than does hit-and-miss marketing scattered across a too-broad population. This doesn't have to be an extremely narrow group unless the product or service fits only a very narrow segment of the population. But the closer you can identify your current and potential customers, the more likely it will be that your specific message will get through to them and convert them into becoming or remaining actual customers.

Consider different products or services:

• Luxury travel vacations
• Toys and educational products for preschoolers
• Fad toys for 7-10 year olds
• Medical or dental supplies
• Auto parts
• Fine Wines and rich gourmet foods
• Supplemental health insurance for Medicare
• Technical journals
• Wholesale office supplies
• Real estate
• Live heavy-metal rock bands
• Textbooks

Now consider some examples of widely divergent target types for whom completely different marketing techniques might be used:

• Highly active, highly athletic health nuts
• Fixed-income retirees
• Expectant mothers
• Married middle-class couples with grown children
• Elementary-age children (two targets here: can you guess?)
• Single college students
• Corporate CEO's
• Teachers and other educators
• Unemployed blue-collar job seekers
• Adolescents and teens
• Career military
• Computer professionals
• Avid pro-sports spectators

Now compare some of the products and services in the first list above with some of the groups of people in the second list. What kind of success would you expect from a marketing campaign that targeted teens for technical journals? Or corporate CEO's for supplemental medicare insurance? You'd probably see a disastrous marketing campaign.

The same is true if you market your web site to the wrong people. Whether you realize it or not, your web site sends out a message not only by what products and services it advertises, but also by its colors, graphics, style, and even the way the text is worded. Would your wording be the same for a 9 year old child as for a CEO? Probably not. (By the way, did you catch the double target in the second list above? Remember you may often have double targets: if your primary target is kids, you also often need to market to their parents because they're usually the ones buying! Or if you're selling wholesale office supplies, your market may be both upper or middle management and the office employees who locate sources and order the supplies.)

Market:
The group of consumers or organizations that is:

• Interested in the product or service
• Has the resources to purchase the product or service
• Is allowed by law and other regulations to acquire the product or service.

The market definition begins with the total population and narrows down progressively:

You may find some overlap. Or you may decide to expand or contract your target market over time depending upon different factors such as changes in your own products or services, the economy, population growth or relocation, or any other changes in the market climate. This is to be expected, and is actually healthy for your business. However, you will usually find that your core target characteristics usually remain fairly consistent over time.

back to  << Planning Your Web Site, Section 1: Targeting Your Web Site