Targeting your market to increase the quality of your prospect

Targeting your market to increase the
quality of your prospects.

By Scott Hache
Platinum Designs

Identifying your target audience is the first and most crucial step in starting or improving your business. You must develop a plan which will effectively capture the attention of your potential customers.

Without a proper plan in place, your business would be like a game of darts, without the dart board. You must find your target or else your time, effort, and hard earned dollars could be lost in cyberspace.

First you must know who your customers are. You may define your customers by creating a customer profile. Your customer profile will consist of three major components. Demographic, Psychographic, and behavioralistic.

The Demographic Component

Identifying the Demographic Factors:

1. Age

What age group are you trying to target? ( ie. Children, Young Parents, Baby Boomers?)

2. Gender

Certain products or services could be better tailored towards a certain gender. Women typically are more nurturing where men typically are more into the bottom line.

3. Profession

Does your ideal customer work for a large corporation, or do they stay at home watching the children?

4. Education level

Would your ideal prospect be someone who has a college or university education?

5. Household income level

The income level of your prospects may play a role in the targeting of your market. Is the product or service affordable enough for the average person? Or does your marketing efforts have to be tailored towards

6. Family Size

Determining the size of the consumers family can be beneficial for consumer products.

By determining who your ideal customer would be you can effectively target your marketing efforts toward your prospect.

The Psychographic Component

The Psychographic component is the factor that influences your customers purchasing decisions. What are the Attitudes beliefs and Emotions of your prospects?

Identify which characteristics best represent your targeted audience:

• What is their current lifestyle?
• Are they are single or more family oriented?
• Are they conservative, trendy, and/or socially responsible?
• Does your audience share a common past-time or hobby?

The Behavioralistic Component

The Behavioristic component is the factor which determines the Motivations or reasons for the customer to buy your product or service.

Identify what is most important to your prospects.

1. Price
2. Location
3. Quality
4. Product Warranties or Guarantees
5. Customer Service and/or Support
6. Brand name

You may also want to determine how often your targeted customer will purchase your product. Will they re-purchase or re-order your products or services on a regular basis?

Once you have built a profile for your ideal customer, the next step is to research the market to determine where you could best advertise to capitalize on the market in which you are targeting.

Visit search engines, websites, read magazines, etc. which reflect the demographics, and interests of your ideal prospect. If you are looking to target young business men, maybe a high-tech site would work. If you are looking to target parents of young children, why not try some parenting websites. You need to get a feel for what type of advertising will work with your audience.

Targeting your market is a crucial step in marketing your business online and offline, once you have developed your customer profile and researched the market carefully to determine where to spend your marketing dollars. You are ready to begin to market your business!