The Importance of Understanding Your Target Market

Feb. 7, 2013 - PRLog -- Do you Know Your Target Market?

When asked, many entrepreneurs, professional practice and small business owners are unable to identify their ideal client, patient, or customer.

An understanding of who your target market is may include such factors as: age, gender, geographic location, income level, professional and/or educational background, affiliations, personal interests, and any number of other demographics.

The danger of not understanding who it is that you want to do business with – and who exactly your business serves – is that you are likely relying on ineffective methods for positioning and marketing what you do.

Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of adopting a non-targeted “shotgun” approach to advertising and branding that exists as the standard in most every industry. Unfortunately, this industry standard often yields simply “standard” results... in other words, results that far less than optimal.

But one of the keys to accelerating your success and better serving the clientele that you want to work with is to realize that you cannot and should not be “all things to all people”.

This is where you developing a target customer/ patient /client profile comes in.

Creating a profile (also known as an avatar) of who this person is will greatly enhance the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and every aspect of your operation for the better.

Tips for Creating An Avatar

First consider the value of knowing your audience. If you offer weight loss solutions, for example, is your ideal client someone interested in weight loss? Or is it a mother between the ages of 30 and 45 who has previously tried (and failed using) various diet plans and lapsed on a health club membership? The second is obviously a much more targeted starting point.

Next ask yourself: what is your ideal client’s primary desired benefit? What positive benefits do they need or desire? What frustrations do they wish to alleviate?

Promoting and positioning your business is all about effectively communicating how your services or products can help your client achieve these benefits and/or remove these frustrations.

It’s important not to make assumptions, but rather to do some research that can help you better understand how to meet their needs and understand how they think.

Some tips include: sending out surveys, reading trade and interest journals, subscribing to their email lists, looking at where they congregate – networking, social, and professional events as well as online social centers such as message boards, blogs and other pertinent websites.

In other words, you must be able to look at your business or practice not as you see it, but as your potential (and current) clients see it, based on their challenges and desires.

This will allow you to “see through their eyes” and in turn serve them better while making your business stronger and more successful in the process.