Finding Your Brand Target Market

Let’s first talk about the difference between target audience and target market. A target market is a set of consumers that a company plans to sell or reach with marketing activities where a target audience is the group or segment within that target market that is being served ads (Marketing Evolution). In this article we will focus on the target market and how your brand can identify yours. Target market is important for businesses in order to be more efficient on targeting specific groups instead of mass marketing to those who may have no interest. It also builds interest in the brand, loyalty and create a higher potential growth of sales. Here are some tips to start finding your brand’s target market.

1.     Determine what needs your product fills. Analyze your product. Who would buy this product and why? This will help you determine the bullet listed in number 4. Let’s look at an example. Your brand sells home good appliances. Your market then would be older adults who own home or rent.

2.     Collect data. Conduct market research. You can do your own research by drawing on existing data, looking at your own network, or gathering from metrics (Forbes). You can collect data using surveys, focus groups and in person talks and/or observations.

3.     Look at your competition. Conduct a competitor analysis. You can do this by looking at their business background. Where are they located and what type of facilities do they have? Look at their products. How’s the quality? What are they missing that you can offer? Look at their social media and take notes. What are their sales strategies? For more information on how to do this visit this LINK.

4.     Choose demographics & physiographics. Demographics are very important in determining your market as stated above. These include age, location, gender, income, education level, marital status, occupation, and ethnicities. And we’ve all heard of demographics but what are physiographics? These are attributes such as personality, values, lifestyle, interests, attitudes, and hobbies or your target market. All of these combined will help create a complete picture of who you will be selling your products to and how to properly market to them.

Finding your brand’s target market will take some work if you’re a new business breaking into a field. The benefits outweigh the time spent on this research and development toward finding your niche market. Funneling your brand’s audience will assist in being more efficient with time and resources spent on marketing to the correct audience. An audience who is interested in your product will create more sales and overall brand loyalties. Even if you’re a company that has been in business for a while, it’s always good to reassess your target market as trends tend to shift over time.

The Importance of Marketing Research

Research shows that businesses are 60% more profitable when they are customer-centric according to an article written by Lucid.  Market research is one of the best ways to do this by getting to know your customer base. This is done through gathering data to learn more about demographics and marketing trends as well as other important aspects of business goals. First, there are many subcategories of marketing research and I will only touch on a few in this article. Let’s first look at branding research. The point of this type of research is to understand what type of impressions your brand is making on the consumer. Do they know who you are and will they buy what you are selling? What qualities are associated with the brand and how it is performing in relation to competitors? This can be conducted through surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one interviews and it will help the brand understand areas that need improvement. Second, let’s talk about customer research. The top three points of this research is to see how satisfied your customers are, what level of loyalty do they have to your brand and who exactly are your customers are. That last one is done through customer segmentation that divides your customers into different subgroups based on their behaviors and preferences. This research is done through looking back at purchasing histories, demographics of client base, customer satisfaction surveys, NPS and customer journey mapping.  A third type of marketing research is competitor research. It’s important to see what your competitors are doing. Where are they succeeding? Where are they lacking? How can you stand out from them as a unique business? This is done by simply finding your competition and doing simple research on them. Let’s also talk about marketing campaign evaluations and research. This is taking data from single campaigns to see how effect they are in the advertising space. How many people have seen your ad? What is the click-through rate? What is the ROI of the campaign? You can use website traffic to track figures from ads run on webpages. You can use social engagement figures, such as clicks, shares, comments and likes. There are many ways to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Now that we’ve discussed a few know that there are many types of marketing research we didn’t touch on and so many ways to obtain the data you need. You can read more about them here. So, why is it important to conduct marketing research? Well, knowing your customers on a deeper level will help you build trust and connect with them more effectively. It will also help you see where you need to improve as a business. Most importantly it helps minimize your risks through understanding what customers want and need. Overall, this will keep your business afloat and on top of trends in the years to come. Not only that, it will help you strive and succeed to the best of your abilities!