Who's YOUR target market?

Who is your target market?

That may sound like an obvious question, but you may be surprised to learn that your ideal target market isn’t quite the ten million people surfing the net each and every day like you thought.

In reality, your target market are specific people with very specific looks, ideals, morals, views and interests.

Therefore it’s going to be important for you to precisely define these individuals in order to increase your click-to-sales ratio.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have 10 people who want my products with credit card in hand than 100 people who are simply ‘lookey loos’ with no intention of buying, or worse yet, can’t afford it.

To find your target market you’ll need to identify individuals right down to specific things like their physical location, what they actually look like, for example their age, race, gender, etc.

Next you’ll need to consider their behaviors, lifestyle and values. Going through these key steps will clue you in on who is really interested in buying, why they might buy and if they can actually pay for it

Here are 3 very crucial steps for identifying your target market:

Step # 1. Determine Why Someone Would Want to buy your product or service

This starts with taking a careful at your product or service and its benefits.

If your selling a web traffic ebook for instance, it’s not enough to tell your potential buyer that they will be getting more traffic, they want to know the real benefits of more traffic.

(Note from Ana: You’d think this would be obvious - to know that you need traffic and why, but trust me, you still need to spell it out, meaning tell them WHY!)

So highlighting the fact that more traffic means more sales, more sales mean more monthly income is an attention getter.

Understand how to expand on those ideas and drill them into your reader.

• Example: A skin care cream with an anti-wrinkle ingredient benefits you by looking younger.
• Example: A toothpaste with an anti-stain ingredient offers the benefit of whiter, more attractive smile.
• Example: A speed reading course means more free time, better comprehension, improving your competitive edge.

Step # 2: Segmenting your market

Dividing your market up into segments helps you know where your market is, exactly who they are and what they are feeling.

Let’s take a closer look at different segmentations:

- Geographic

Geographic segmentation is about determining a specific geography or physical location of your market, things like country, state, city or region. Most internet marketers aren’t limited to a geographic location; selling electronic picture frames on the web for instance could include a worldwide geographic location; while a local gardening service will have a much smaller local market.

- Demographic

A market’s demographics are things like age, income, gender, education, marital status, occupation and race.

Here’s what a customer profile might look like after close examination of the customer demographics:

An upscale women’s shoe company targets women executives between the ages of 35 and 55, with an average household income of greater than $100,000, who require comfortable sporting shoes for travel and recreation.

That’s a pretty specific demographic covering gender, income, age and occupation. The more focused your demographic, the easier it is to find your market so you can tailor your marketing strategies to those specific individuals.

- Psychographics

Psychographics takes into consideration lifestyles, behaviors, values and attitudes.

These things will tell you a lot about people’s hobbies, interests, how they behave and what they value. It’s also how you’ll be able to determine if your products or services are appealing enough to pay for.

But here’s the fun part: using these psychographics with the power of emotion you’ll be able to develop a very powerful strategy for helping your market make the buying decision.

For example, most buying decisions are triggered by emotion. It’s need versus want.

“I may not need that sporty, top of the line, BMW sports coup, but I sure do want one!“

Knowing what things interest your target market and what triggers their emotions will help you pinpoint exactly how to market to them.

To give you a better idea of how to visualize this, let’s look at the five most common ideals that trigger emotional buying:

• Looking better - Vanity/Beauty
• Recreation - having fun, perfecting hobbies, relaxation
• Health - feeling better and living longer
• Money - making more money, saving money
• Love - Finding love, extending love (hence the popularity of dating sites)

By associating your products with one of these emotions, you can put together a plan that will appeal to your market’s lifestyle and values and then you will be able to move in to seal the deal by appealing to their emotions.

Step #3 Drawing up your conclusion

Now it’s time to draw up your conclusions about how to find your target market.

Begin by looking at where they are.

Is your market defined to a city, state or country or is your market location worldwide?

Narrow your market down even further by getting a clear picture of the individuals you will be marketing to.

Are they men, women or both? How old are they? What are their income levels, marital status, etc?

From there you will need to look at your markets lifestyle, values, morals, and behaviors.

Understanding how individuals behave, their values and attitudes may not always be obvious and this step will require a little more research to understand them.

The best way to find out this information about your market is to simply ask. You can solicit information from existing customers or survey people with free survey sites like surveymonkey.com or freeonlinesurverys.com.

Marketing Takeaway

It doesn’t matter what type of business you have or where you choose to market your products and services.

What does matter is that you reach an audience of individuals who have the most potential to buy what you have to offer and that comes with identifying your target market with a clear focus and a strong purpose.

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Ana’s Notes

I just discovered an awesome tool to make your target market research a cinch: DoubleClick Ad Planner by Google.

With as much personal information as Google collects from all of us on a daily basis, I think this tool is as accurate as it gets. Of course, it’s entirely free too.

Here are some screen shots for you to see what it can do. I did a search on Traffic Generation Cafe - learned a lot about my readers, that’s for sure.

There are 2 ways to look for the information through Ad Planner:

1. by looking up the site URL, and that’s what you see in the screen shot above.

2. by searching by audience, where you can choose any parameters you wish to find the perfect reader/customer:

And there you have it.

I think Lisa and I just took away ANY excuse you might’ve held on to that “prevented” you from doing your target market research in the past.

Any effective traffic generation starts with proper market research - remember that.