Would try to sell a steak to a vegetarian? I hope not because you probably couldn't even give it to them for free. These are the things you need to avoid. One of your top responsibilities as a marketer is to clearly define your target market.
If you don't, you could lose a lot of money in advertising by marketing to people that have absolutely no interest in what you're selling.
What Is A Target Market?
Your target market is your audience of people that you have narrowed down who would be best suited to buy what you are selling. Defining this group of people is possibly the most important aspect of a marketer's job.
The top marketers always know exactly who to market to and don't ever go outside of their target market.
How Do You Define Your Target Market?
You must define it by looking at what you are selling first. Whether you are selling skin car products, weight loss products, marketing products, personal development products, etc., you have to know what category your products fall in.
Then, you must figure out the problem the products or service you have solves. Your best bet in marketing is to market a product or service that solves a problem for a lot of people.
For your product to be good, it needs to have a big market of buyers in the industry you are associating with. These people have a problem and your product or service solves it, so they are willing to pay for it.
This makes them a good target market. But, you also want to take it a step further in some cases. You don't just want to market to people with the problem, you want to market to buyers with the problem.
So if you can define who has the problem that your product or service solves and then target the ones that have bought items in the same industry already, that would be a perfect target market.
If you're selling an opportunity like network marketers do, your best target market would be other network marketers because they already have joined companies and believe in the industry.
Where To Find The Target Market
Well now that you probably know who your target market is, how do you find them? There are many different places to search for these people including:
- Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing
- Youtube
- Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- People on email lists of your fellow marketers in the same industry
- People that follow blogs in the same industry
Now that you know where to find these people, you have to figure out how to market to this specific audience to maximize your business revenue.
How To Market To This Audience
You can market to them using search engine PPC for Google, Yahoo and Bing. You use keywords for your ads to define what your audience would search for and where your ads pop up.
You can also do solo ads to other marketers' email lists that are related to your industry or have bought a product similar to yours.
There are also banner ads that you can pay to put on popular blogs and other websites that rank in the top results of search engines for the keywords your target market would search for.
I would also recommend looking into Facebook PPC advertising because you can laser target your audience with options like age, interests, relationship status, occupation, etc.
For cheaper ways to market to these people, try starting a blog while writing about targeted keywords or make videos for Youtube that are optimized for the keywords. There are countless ways to get in front of these people.
Conclusion Of Defining Your Target Market
If you know exactly what problem your product/service solves, can find buyers of similar products, know where to find these people and then know how to effectively market to them, you are well on your way to being very successful.
It's all about your ability to define your target market and knowing how to get in front of them as a marketer.