Defining Your Target Market by Karl Bryan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) December 18, 2009 -- Many businesses can’t answer the question: Who is your target market (TM)? They have often made the fatal assumption that everyone will want to purchase their product or service with the right marketing strategy.

A TM is simply the group of customers or clients who will purchase a specific product or service. This group of people all has something in common, often age, gender, hobbies, or location.

Your TM, then, are the people who will buy your offering. This includes both existing and potential customers, all of whom are motivated to do one of three things:
• Fulfill a need
• Solve a problem
• Satisfy a desire

To build, maintain, and grow your business, you need to know who your customers are, what they do, what they like, and why they would buy your product or service. Getting this wrong – or not taking the time to get it right – will cost you time, money, and potentially the success of your business.


The Importance of Knowing Your TM

Knowledge and understanding of your TM is the keystone in the arch of your business. Without it, your product or service positioning, pricing, marketing strategy, and eventually, your business could very quickly fall apart.

If you don’t intimately know your TM, you run the risk of making mistakes when it comes to establishing pricing, product mix, or service packages. Your marketing strategy will lack direction, and produce mediocre results at best. Even if your marketing message and USP are clear, and your brochure is perfectly designed, it means nothing unless it arrives in the hands (or ears) of the right people.

Determining your TM takes time and careful diligence. While it often starts with a best guess, assumptions can not be relied on and research is required to confirm original ideas. Your TM is not always your ideal market.

Once you build an understanding of who your target market is, keep up with your market research. Having your finger on the pulse of their motivations and drivers – which naturally change – will help you to anticipate needs or wants and evolve your business.

Types of Markets
Consumer

The Consumer Market includes those general consumers who buy products and services for personal use, or for use by family and friends. This is the market category you or I fall into when we’re shopping for groceries or clothes, seeing a movie in the theatre, or going out for lunch. Retailers focus on this market category when marketing their goods or services.
Institutional
The Institutional Market serves society, and provide products or services for the benefit of society. This includes hospitals, non-profit organizations, government organizations, schools and universities. Members of the Institutional Market purchase products to use in the provision of services to people in their care.
Business to Business (B2B)
The B2B Market is just what it seems to be: businesses who purchase the products and services of other business to run their operations

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