Target Markets

This article was contributed by Geoff Clynes. Geoff is a partner is Business Line, a Warragul-based marketing group offering help and advice on business development issues. This article is the second in a series of eight.

Small business owners often say they don’t care where their customer comes from. That’s reasonable: nobody in their right mind refuses good money.

The question is not so much what business do you ACCEPT, as where should you LOOK for new business? The advantage of changing the question is, you can stop wasting time attracting all the people who might, and focus on those who ought to deal with you. No matter how you’re promoting or advertising, where will you get the highest proportion of potential clients? To answer that well, study why people want to buy your offer – not why you think they should. Perhaps you have to ask. Perhaps you’ll learn something valuable.

Don’t confuse the people who buy from you with a Target Market, though they might be able to help you identify one. Target markets are groups of people whose custom you’ve decided you want more of. If you’re about to spend time, money, effort, skill looking for new business - why not do it where you can expect the best sales returns?

Once you settle on a target market, then you have a place to go (whether you visit, email, or phone) with new ideas and special offers at maximum effectiveness, because it’s a place where most of the messages should be of interest to most of the receivers. That’s because you designed the messages that way. Think about newspaper advertising, say for new cars or cinema programs - probably less than 1% of the newspaper buyers actually use those services. So 99% of that advertising is wasted. Who’s the advertisers’ target market? They must be mad.

Not really; they use other channels as well: but if you want to grow your business, how might you develop a target market?

Try this:

Stop thinking about you, your offer, your business. Think about your best customers. What do they DO with your service?

What kind of buyer has those (or similar) problems?

Doesn’t matter whether they are people, companies, non profits, where they live or work, what they do or think: if they are similar in that way, note it down; use that as a clue next time you go spruiking for new business. Spruiking is important, because your established customers occasionally die, move, change their needs or just get offended over some trifling thing about you.

Now put it to use:

Make a list – a big list - of the buyers you know fit that "ideal" description.

See if you can make that list a few times the size of your current customer base

Now send a persuasive offer to all the members of that list.

What happens?

Next Topic - Competitors

© Copyright Business Line 2003: This text is for use and publication by the Gippsland.com web portal, and may be reproduced and distributed without charge. It remains the property of Geoff Clynes & Associates (trading as Business Line), and may not be sold or distributed for profit without the owner’s express permission