Understanding your market

It was great to hear from one of my clients the other day that they had just had their best three months’ turnover ever.

We have been working together for some months on marketing and sales.  Prior to that, his efforts in this direction had been sporadic and lacked any coherent targeting or message.

After analysing what was different and better about his service and what his target market looked like we started to build a marketing strategy.  The strategy sets out what message he needs to get to which prospects and in what ways (such as email marketing, events and so on).  With my guidance, he has built and implemented a simple marketing activity plan that he can follow to make this marketing happen.

The results speak for themselves.

Here are some points to consider:

What is your market?

-          Your market is a subset of all the prospects who might conceivably purchase from you

-          These prospects have a number of attributes in common

-          These attributes mean that you are in some way able to achieve superior margins when selling to these prospects

-          This is often called your market niche, or market sector

-          You may have a number of different markets for different products

What common attributes constitute a market?

-          Pains or desires – the need to feed a growing family on a budget, the need to reduce the costs of IT in a growing business, the desire to flaunt wealth

-          Geography – Acacia Avenue or Slough or Berkshire or the UK or the World

-          Size – number of employees, or waist measurement

-          Industry – also known as a vertical

-          Income – for consumer sales (or turnover for B2B)

-          Attitude – early adopter, or risk averse, or conservative, or thrill seekers

-          Age – for consumer sales or age of business for B2B sales

-          Event – divorce, retirement, birthday, acquisition, recruitment – also known as market triggers

-          Existing products – BMW owners, or oil-fired boiler owners, or Linux users

Why should you target a specific market niche?

-          A tight definition of your market niche allows you to focus your marketing efforts

-          A tight definition of the need allows you to develop a compelling proposition

-          A better fit between your proposition and the need makes you a specialist, differentiates you and increases margins

-          Focus on a particular niche makes you more memorable and allows you to develop a reputation (or brand) more quickly