This is the third post on four reasons why small business owners don’t use target marketing. You can access the first two posts in this series by clicking the links below:

• They really believe they can market to everybody – that everybody wants what they sell.
  
• They don’t know how to predict characteristics of their potential customers in order to separate the target market from the market at large.

This post covers the third reason:

Not Knowing How To Conduct
Target Market Research

By the time you determine your customers demographic characteristics, you may think that you’ve done enough research on your target market. But not so.

Demographics like age, gender, income, and education level provide only a starting place in your target market research. Alone it wont’ help your marketing all that much.

To really benefit from target market research, you have to take it a step further and discover the personality and behavioral characteristics that go with the demographics.

How To Conduct
Target Market Research
An Example

Let me give you an example using age. Age reveals your target market’s generation and life stage. Both tell you much about what concerns them, what they value, what media reaches them and what kind of messages best speak to them.

So after you know age, you need to know:

• what generation and life stage represent that age,
• the personality and behavioral characteristics that go with that generation and life stage, and
• characteristics for every other demographic.

Once you know all these characteristics, you can do the kind of research that you did for a high school term paper. Sticking to our age example, you’d search for information about your target market’s generation and lifestyle. Let’s say, you realize that your target age group is in Generation X and the early adulthood life stage.

So you go to your local library or do a Google search for these terms. Copy what you find. Read and highlight it. Organize it, and eventually develop a profile for Generation X and the early adulthood life stage.

Now you need to repeat this process for every other demographic and related characteristic. So it can be a pretty time consuming process. And until now the only way to get your target market information without spending lots of time on research was to hire a marketing agency to do it for you. That’s the topic of the final post in this series.

Conducting target market research is easy when you use my Matrix Market Segmentation process. Just complete the form below, and I’ll send you a copy plus weekly post summaries.

To get to the next post in this series, see The Marketing Research Process – Time Consuming, Expensive?

To get summaries with links to more posts about market research, see Monitoring And Evaluation Market Analysis Monthly Roundup.

If you need help getting information about your target market, I’ve researched 19 target market profiles. One may be just what you’re looking for.

Posted 10-31-08:
How To Conduct
Target Market Research

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You may find Personas mentioned on marketing blogs and sites. Personas represent a type of qualitative target market research

Many businesses use personas as a way of visualizing potential customers in order to market to them. Personas serve the same purpose as target market research, but the two aren’t exactly the same. Each has advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Personas
Compared To Target Markets

The major advantage of personas over target markets is that personas allow you to add detail to the visualized customer. This detail may not found in target market research because marketers use their experience and instincts to estimate what the best customer for a product is like.

Another advantage of personas is that they provide an imaginary person that you can hold up to represent your potential customer.

Disadvantages of Personas

Compared To Target Markets

The disadvantages of personas are flip sides of the same coin as the advantages.

The first disadvantage is that many of the distinctive characteristics of the potential customer come from experience and instinct instead of from research. Some marketers believe that their experience is more valuable than research.

But throughout my career, I’ve often experienced two experienced marketers form different conclusions based on their experiences. So I trust research more. It’s more consistent. It’s more verifiable and reliable.

The second disadvantage grows out of the first. Because personas go beyond what you know from research, it’s more probable that part of your imaginary person doesn’t really represent your potential customers. Just one small mistake in understanding your customers can result in a failed marketing campaign.

Why I Prefer Target Market Research
To Personas

While I recognize the value of being able to visualize your potential customers and think of one person to represent them. I believe this can be done using research. Demographic, phychographic and behavioral characteristics acquired through market segmentation can create detailed pictures of target market., I call them target market profiles. But because they are based on research, they are more likely to be reliable and accurate than personas.

Personas and Target Market Research
Conclusion

Using either personas or target market research will help you to visualize a picture of potential and present customers.

I believe all business people need to take this approach to select and direct their marketing at a target market. Some small business owners think they can market to everybody. That usually results in what I call marketing madness. It just throws money at marketing and provides little return on marketing investments.

You can use market segmentation to learn more about customers and potential customers with the idea of developing clear pictures of them. Once that picture is clear, it’s much easier to develop products and marketing tactics that improve conversions and reciprocal relationships.

You can use personas or target market research to market to potential customers. I believe that target market research is the better of the two methods.

You can learn more about marketing research at the page linked below:

Why Is Marketing Research Important?

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Posted 8-11-08:
Personas Compared To
Target Market Research

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