Predicting characteristics of your potential customers isn’t easy. And some small business owners don’t select a target market primarily because they don’t know how to pick characteristics that define the target market.

So not knowing how to predict characteristics of your potential customers is a second major reason that small business owners don’t use target marketing.

Knowing that only one group of people comprise your target market still leaves you short of knowing what characteristics your potential customers share. It takes research to learn their characteristics.

Determining Characteristics Of Your Present Customers

If you already have a good customer base that research is easier than if you’re just starting out and don’t have many customers yet. That’s because it’s relatively easy to get your present customers to give you information. They have a relationship with you. They likely trust you, and they want you to provide them with their ideal product and services.

So they are motivated to give you information that you can use to give them back what they want. They will likely take a short survey, provide demographics and contact information to enter a contest, or give you on-the-spot feedback when they purchase from you.

But if you’re just starting out and haven’t already determined a target market, it’s much more difficult to determine shared characteristics for your best potential customers. But until you know what your potential customers have in common and how they are different from everybody else in the market, you’ll never do an effective job of marketing.

Determining Characteristics Of Your Potential Customers

One way to gather shared characteristics is to visualize the kind of person whom you think will likely buy your product. How old is this person? Is the person a man or woman? How much education does this person have? You just continue asking yourself these kinds of questions and recording the answers until you’ve got a good list of target market characteristics.

Then you seek out people with those characteristics and determine if they really are potential customers. If some are, but some aren’t, what characteristic makes them different from one another? Through this cyclical process of visualization and verification, you will discover your potential customers’ demographic characteristics.

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How To Conduct Target Market Research

Posted 10-29-08: Predicting Characteristics Of Your Potential Customers

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