How to identify your target market

We already discussed what is a target market. Knowing how to identify your target market is crucial when it comes to properly spreading the word about your product and avoid wasting resources. There are various techniques to achieve this and now we are going to explore, with a step by step approach the one I use with all my clients when we sit down to chat about promotion and marketing in general.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE SEGMENTS

The first step is to identify your audience segments. Segmenting groups will help you determine content types, and topics that are most relevant to these targeted segments.
• Who are your customers?
• Who are they as individuals? What are the common denominators among them?
• What are the demographics for these audience segments?
• What are the behavioral attributes for these segments?
• What assumptions are shared by your audience?

STEP 2: DEFINE THEIR NEEDS

Identifying needs is another way of understanding the underlying pain points.
• What problems, struggles or challenges do they have?
• What tasks are they trying to accomplish?
• What do they need?
• What do they want?
• What are the trends within their industries?
• What motivates them?

STEP 3: DEFINE THEIR ONLINE BEHAVIORS

The third step gets into their online behaviors.
• What does each segment search for online?
Search behavior
• What are the volumes for these queries and query clusters?
• What are some related queries to the keywords I've considered?
• Which social media sites do your prospects and customers prefer to use?
Social behavior
• What are they talking about on social networks?
• How are they using social media?
• When and how do they make recommendations to others?
• How do they discover, consume and share content?
Content behavior
• What are their content preferences? What content is downloaded the most? Shared the most?

STEP 4: DEFINE THEIR INTERESTS

Internal analytics plays a part in this step. In this step, you want to figure out the tipping points for moving
customers through the buying process. Do this by studying what's worked.
• What would most strongly influence this audience to accept my message, my content?
• What influences them to move ahead to the next stage in the customer engagement cycle?
 
What do you think about the above questions to find out how to identify your target market?
Was it easy for you to answer them? Do you already have appropriate analytics that make answering these a breeze? :)
If you're unsure, you might want to check this out.
 

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