Target Market: Eight Questions To Ask About Yours, 1-4

Your target market determines your marketing and profit potential for your business. When you are analyzing a potential target market, you should answer each of the following eight questions.

1. Who is your target market?

2. What is your target market’s profile?

3. What influences your target market members’ buying behavior?

4. Who influences your target market’s buying decisions?

5. How often and how much will target market members buy your product or service?

6. When and under what circumstances will target market members buy?

7. What are target market members’ preferences and needs?

8. Can you build a relationship with them so they will be loyal to your product or service?

I will cover the first four questions in today’s post and the second four in tomorrow’s post.

1. Who Is Your Target Market?

Your target market is composed of the people most likely to buy your product or service.

You need to know the size of your overall market and the specific segments of that market that you expect to reach through your target market

Your target market should provide the best potential for growth, ease of entry, ability to compete, and profit potential, with the least amount of risks.

Next you need to determine the distribution methods that will best reach this target market and how much product or service is presently being sold to this target market.

You also need to consider the social, technical, environmental and economic changes in the overall market that will impact sales to your target market.

2. What Is Your Target Market’s Profile?

Developing a target market profile involves factual data from which you can derive other information. By pulling all the information together, you produce a profile of your target market.

3. What Influences Your Target Market Members’ Buying Behavior?

You should include in your target market profile, your target market’s buying behavior. Each market is influenced by values and concerns that cause them to buy some products and not others, and to be influenced to buy more by some appeals than by other appeals.

4. Who Influences Your Target Market’s Buying Decisions?

Everybody is influenced to buy more by some people than by others. People who influence other people to buy are called an intermediate market. If you can impress people in intermediate markets for your target market, they will often influence many target market members to buy.

For instance, if college students composed your target market, you’d want to consider their friends, parents and teachers as intermediate markets.

Their friends influence their music, movie and clothing choices. Parents influence their large purchase choices like vehicles and colleges. Teachers influence their school and career related decisions. For instance, when I was teaching, students often asked my advice about where to get their portfolios printed economically.

You start understanding your target market members by answering the four questions in today’s post. Tomorrow’s post will cover the last four questions that can help you start discovering how to best appeal to your target market. You can access it below:

Questions 5-8 About Your Target Market

You can learn how to discover the best appeals for your target market by getting my free report on market segmentation by completing the form below.

Or you can get a DVD on Marketing Your Small Business by just paying shipping and handling.

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