The saying “if you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one” is more apt than ever before.
Why?
Because the B2B world is growing by the day. In order to stand out and build yourself a solid customer base, it’s important that you’re targeting people who will benefit from your service or product.
It’s easy to think that you’ll just target anyone who’s interested in what you offer, but it’s impossible to resonate with every single person – particularly if you’re a smaller business up against much larger brands.
In this instance, you can easily compete with the bigger brands by targeting a specific sub-section of the market.
By specifically identifying your target market you can efficiently use your resources to attract your potential customers.
So how can you do that? How can you identify who your target market is?
1. Figure out the Need for Your Product or Service
In order to choose a target market that’s actually going to invest in your products or services, it’s important to look at what you’re offering and how that will help your customers solve their problems.
Start by listing out the major features of your product or service and then highlight the benefits of each of them.
For example, the analytics software provider offers automated data. The benefit is quick access to important stats that saves the buyer time.
Once you’ve got a list of all the benefits your service or product provides, start thinking about who those benefits will help. For our analytics software provider, it’s going to be busy businesses that don’t have the time to manually dig into their data.
2. Analyze Your Current Customer Base
It’s best to start with information you already know, so look to the customer base you already have to get started.
Who are the people that are already buying from you? Do they have anything in common?
You can learn about your customers in a variety of different ways. Talking to your customers and running surveys are a great way to gather more information on them but that may come with some bias. To offset that bias, it’s a good idea to look at sales data, customer relationship management (CRM) data, and any other data you may have on hand.
Here, you want to look out for things like similar characteristics, interests, and whether their businesses connect in any way. Once you’ve drawn up a list of similarities, you can then look into which customers are your most profitable.
3. Research Your Competition
Once you know who your main customers are, look to your competitors.
Identify between 3 and 5 of the biggest brands in your industry and determine who it is that they’re targeting.
For example, if you’re an analytics software brand looking at other analytics providers, do they target small businesses in the finance industry? Do they target local service providers like florists and barbers?
The key here is to identify who they’re targeting and go after a different market. It’s easier to see success if you find a different audience that your competitors might be overlooking.
4. Dig Even Deeper Into Your Audience
You now have a list of benefits, an idea of the customers you already have, and have started to think about the kinds of audience your product or service can help.
While this might provide you with an overview of a potential target market (for example, finance companies that need to save time), it’s not really detailed enough.
This is where the psychographics of your customers come in, which refers to more personal characteristics of your audience. It goes deeper than simple demographic information, and instead is all about personality, values, hobbies, behavior, and lifestyles.
Finding a target market that share similarities in these aspects, as well as the type of business they have, is where the money lies.
You can then determine how your product or service ties into your target market’s lifestyle and values by thinking about what features are the most appealing and what aspects of your business will help them get from A to B.
5. Create a Detailed Customer Persona
Once you’ve collated all of this information, it’s time to create a really in-depth customer persona that you can draw from for marketing, communications, and for choosing what products and services to release.
Again, this customer persona should include both demographic information about your target market as well as psychographic details that go even deeper than just who they are and what they do.
Ask yourself questions like:
- What level of business are my target market at? Are they Fortune 500 companies? Startups? In between?
- How many employees do they have on average?
- How much revenue do they make a year?
- What are their biggest struggles and challenges with their business?
- Where do they see their business in 10 years time?
Identifying Your Target Market is Vital for Success
Let’s loop back to the saying we mentioned at the beginning:
“If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.”
Knowing exactly who it is you’re targeting with your business makes everything a whole lot easier: you’ll know who you’re speaking to with your marketing materials and how to speak to them in a way that resonates with their needs and desires, and you’ll be able to hone your products and services to better fit what your target customers want.
As a result, you’ll be able to position yourself in the market and attract more customers rather than if you simply tried to target everyone.
Need help identifying your target market? Let the experts help!