How to Define Your Target Market
There’s a famous adage in marketing that says, if your target market is anyone and everyone, you end up reaching no one. This is a problem that I see with many entrepreneurs: they try and boil the ocean and reach every single person alive with their message, product or service. Rather than defining your target market in broad brush strokes, you need to drill-down and get specific.
In our current environment, there is a tremendous amount of information that is hurled at us daily. If you aren’t speaking to a very specific person, your message will get drowned out in all the noise that we encounter every day. Generalities won’t work anymore. You can no longer say, “Choosy Moms choose JIF.” Instead, you need to say “Choosy Moms that work a full-time job after graduating from a state college, that enjoy watching the Bachelor and have 8–16-year-old kids choose JIF”.
See the difference?
Ultimately, your product or service needs to solve an identifiable problem for your target market. To help you drill down further and fully understand your target market, let’s work through the steps necessary to identify a target market for an imaginary business.
Maria, The Home Stager
For our example, we are going to use a lady named Maria. A little background about Maria. She’s single and in her early 30s working a corporate job, but she wants to realize her dream of being a home stager. After following my guide to getting started, she is ready to identify her perfect target customer. The first key for her is to understand every single thing about this person. Let’s take a look at some specific questions she should be asking to find her target customer:
- Why does this person need her service?
- Who is this person? Are they a real estate investor? Homeowner? Real estate agent?
- What does this person look like? Are they a young professional looking to buy a larger house due to a growing family? Or are they a retired, empty-nesting couple that wants to downsize?
- What is their background? Are they a college graduate? Are they currently employed? What are their wants and needs?
- What are their hobbies, passions or interests?
- Do they enjoy cooking at home or do they go out to eat most meals?
- Are they concerned about safety and security in their home?
- Do they take pride in their home and community?
- What are their biggest fears, uncertainties or doubts?
As you can see, we are drilling down and being extremely specific with our responses because that’s what it takes to truly understand your target market/customer.
If Maria’s initial target market was “people who are selling their house” she can now see how insufficient that is to identify her market. To give a full picture, let’s fully flesh out her target customer so you can understand the level of detail required to properly identify your target market.
Maria’s Target Market
After careful analysis and some soul searching, Maria has identified her target market. Maria will be targeting the children of parent’s who passed away and bequeathed their house to their heirs.
These children are busy with their own lives. Lives full of taking kids to soccer practice, working a full-time job (commuting at least 30 minutes each way), grocery shopping, etc. Essentially, they are busy young professionals with a lot of responsibilities already, and the thought of having to hire a home inspector, appraiser, real estate agent and stager is overwhelming to them.
They are also well educated with the majority of them having college degrees. They like to mainly cook and hang out at home, but enjoy taking the kids out to playgrounds, parks, and beaches during the weekend to get away from the noise and stress of daily life. They enjoy supporting small, local businesses. They are concerned with making sure Mom & Dad’s place is well respected and taken care of because of the memories that flood their emotions whenever they go back to their childhood home. They love that home and want it to go to a lovely, young, loving couple that will cherish it for years to come.
They are afraid that someone will take advantage of them in this time of emotional stress and overwhelming decisions they have to make. They have doubts that the money they spend on staging the home will make a difference. They are worried that they won’t be able to pay for two mortgages and that the house will sit vacant for months. They are worried about someone breaking into the house if it sits empty for too long. They also want the reassurance that they are making the right decisions and doing the right thing. They want to make Mom & Dad proud of their actions and how they will handle this new responsibility.
See the difference?
We’ve gone from a target market of ‘people who want to sell their home’ all the way to an extremely specific and detailed account of this person, who they are and what they want. Can you see the difference in how you can approach and market prospects now that you have this fully formed picture of your target customer?
We’ll stop here today and continue this series next week where we’ll look at how to begin the conversation with these target customers before wrapping up with an overview on how to deliver proposals and quotes.
As always, please chime in with any questions that you have. This can be a challenging and time-consuming exercise to go through, but one that is essential to your business’ success. Make sure you are investing the time upfront to answer these questions and not flying blindly into a storm of generalities.
