How To Choose A Profitable Target Market

Choosing the right target market is essential to your marketing strategy. A good target market will not only need and value your products and services but also be profitable. There’s no point in targeting people who can’t afford to pay, nor should you try to convince and persuade people who don’t want or need your services to buy from you.

From your perspective, not everyone that wants to hire you will be a profitable client. For example, you may have worked with ‘difficult’ clients in the past who never seemed satisfied. Odds are, you probably don’t want more of those clients. You’re left with a fairly small number of people who have a need for your services and who you’d like to work with.

How To Choose a Target Market

Choosing a target audience requires doing some initial research up front. You want to make sure that you can offer services that solve your prospects’ immediate problems, that you understand their motivations and psychological needs, and that you can establish a good working relationship with them.

The first step to picking a target involves compiling the information you currently have about your current customers. This includes details about:

• Demographics – Where do they live? How much do they make? How old are they? Their gender?
• Lifestyle – What do they do for a living? What motivates them? What types of interests and hobbies do they have? What type of car do they drive? Where do they go on holidays or vacations?
• Lifetime Value – Are they a one time buyer or are they likely to need your services on an ongoing basis? How much will it cost to acquire them? Are they price shoppers?
• Attitude Towards Technology – Do they buy the latest and greatest, or do they wait until everyone else is doing it? How do they connect to the internet, and what do they do while online? What types of media channels do they respond best to?

Research Your Target Market

You can acquire a large amount of this information by collecting the information you currently have on your clients from sales information to complaints and suggestions.

You also should look at responses to previous marketing campaigns. How have previous campaigns, either by your firm or by competitors, worked with target prospects? Which media channel got the best results? Which campaign message worked best?

Finally, trade magazines and published reports can fill in the gaps you may still have. Many target prospects may not know they have a need for your service, so you have no data to profile those you’ve never had contact with before. Or perhaps data you’ve collected is now obsolete.

Creating Persona Behaviors

Once you’ve compiled your data, you’ll probably find that you have a number of potential targets to choose from. The best way to analyze which to target is to create an ideal profile for each group. This requires some brainstorming and role playing to come up with fictitious personas. You should make profiles as true to your target audience as possible – giving him or her a name, a job, a family, hobbies, technology attitudes, and media preferences. Using each profile, you can play out different scenarios to best reach each person and move them through their purchase cycle from awareness to purchasing your services.

Now you are in a position to forecast how much it will cost to acquire each person, what media channels will best reach them, what types of information and messages each persona will respond best to, and how much they will likely spend on your services. You can back up your predictions with case study data from your current and past clients. This allows you to calculate the costs to execute each scenario against how much it will bring in. Clearly, the personas that bring in the best returns will be your most profitable clients.

Keys To Success

From the beginning, your campaign should have measurable indicators of whether your goals are being met. For example, email campaigns might be measured by how many people opened the newsletter, how many people clicked through to your website for your offer, or how many people completed the call to action – such as purchasing a subscription or downloading your free white paper. However, your overall marketing campaign is to drive people to hire your firm. Each point of contact with your prospects should make them more likely to take that next step in their purchasing cycle.

Additionally, if you find something isn’t working, try something else. Sometimes, the message is off or your target is less likely to respond to the media channel you are using. Don’t wait 12 months out to evaluate your campaign’s success. The trick to marketing success is to tweak and evaluate, keeping what is working while revising what isn’t.

Related Posts

• 3 Reasons To Choose a Target Market
• 5 Questions You Should Be Able To Answer About Your Online Target Market
• 5 Key Factors for Choosing a Niche Market
• How To Only Work with Ideal Clients
• Why Finding A Niche is Key to Marketing Success