For many small and medium-sized businesses, we’re so focused on determining our preferred marketing channels – web, email, social media, online ads, or even print that we often neglect the fundamental ‘strategic’ components of marketing. That’s why we’ve decided to touch on these in the coming months as they’re so critical to a business’ success. This month we’ll be discussing target markets.
Why Target Markets matter
Arguably, target markets are the fundamental building block in formulating your marketing strategy. Why? Simply because if you don’t know the types of customers you’re going after and why, how could you possibly determine what messages you will send them and via which medium?
Determining one’s target markets can be a challenging and time-consuming endeavour that can take up much time and resources (i.e. money). Consequently, many businesses simply make assumptions or guesses or just skip this step in the marketing decision-making process.
Determining your preferred Target Markets
To effectively determine your target markets, you need to complete an introspective look at your business and the products and services you sell. What makes you unique as a business? What makes your products and services stand out from your competitors? How can you use these characteristics to carve out a unique niche within your marketplace?
These and several other questions can help you assess and determine where your business should ‘play’ – what geographic, demographic, industry and other factors would enable you to optimally leverage the distinctive attributes in your business.
As you can see from the above noted points, being unique or distinctive is the basis for successfully choosing the right target markets for your business. Failure to do this will result in you competing for the wrong clients in the wrong markets using the wrong products or services that won’t resonate optimally with these groups. And why would anyone want to do this?
Getting Started
At Sydcam Marketing Communications, we pride ourselves in developing comprehensive marketing strategies for our clients. These include a comprehensive review and recommendations for the target markets a business should focus on when trying to establish and grow their businesses.
If you’re thinking about trying to define your target markets yourself, we always recommend you first start by completing a detailed SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) on your business.
By focusing on the strengths and opportunities when defining your target markets while also avoiding or minimizing the impact of any weaknesses or threats inherent within your company, you should be able to make a great start at defining the primary, secondary and even tertiary markets that would be most attractive to you.
Keep it simple
Note that we caution companies on selecting more than 2-3 main target markets for any one product or service, or company as a whole. While the temptation is there to be attractive and relevant to as large an audience as possible, the reality is that doing so tends to ‘water down’ your efforts, particularly when your marketing budget is limited.
It’s always better to focus your efforts at least initially on the most attractive markets with the highest potential. Direct the necessary resources to those markets and if this proves successful, over time you can broaden this to other outlier markets, especially if there are inherent synergies with your main target markets.
If you need help either determining your target market or implementing a marketing plan to go after them, we can help. Contact us today; we’d be happy to discuss how we can assist you in developing a more focused and cost-effective marketing effort for your business.
