A target market is a group of people who have similar traits, and a business focuses on them when promoting its products or services. Knowing who your target market is helps your business succeed. In this post, we’ll explain what a target market is, the different types, why it’s important, give some examples, and show you steps to define it to improve your marketing.
What is a Target Market?
A target market is a group of people who are most likely to buy a product because they have similar traits, like age, income, and lifestyle. Identifying the target market is an important step for a company when deciding how to design, package, and advertise its product.
Types Of Target Markets
Market researchers use surveys about activities, interests, and opinions (AIO) to understand the types of people they want to target. Marketing experts divide consumers into four main groups:
- Demographic: This includes basic things that define your target market, like age, income, gender, job, and education level.
- Geographic: This is about location. Since the world is more connected now, companies need to consider where people live and their local preferences.
- Psychographic: This goes beyond basic info and looks at people’s lifestyle, beliefs, interests, and values.
- Behavioral: This focuses on how current customers make decisions. Companies may use research on past products to decide if they should introduce new ones that people will like.
Example of a Target Market
When thinking about who will buy a new product, you can use the four target markets to help decide. For example, there are about 49,773 Italian restaurants in the U.S., showing how popular they are.
A small pizza shop might mostly attract younger people who want something affordable. On the other hand, a fancy restaurant with white tablecloths might be more popular with older people and families who live nearby. A new, trendy restaurant down the street might attract people who love the latest food trends and are willing to travel far for a unique menu and fancy wine list.
In each case, the business owner thought carefully about who their ideal customer is and made changes to the menu, decor, and advertising to match what that customer wants.
Importance of Target Market
Not many products today are made to suit everyone. For example, the Aveda Rosemary Mint Bath Bar costs $26 at Aveda stores and is aimed at women who care about the environment and are willing to pay more for high-quality products. On the other hand, a pack of eight Dial soaps costs $11.49 at CVS and is known for being simple and reliable.
To sell something successfully, it’s important to know who will want to buy it. A product can attract more customers over time through marketing, ads, and word of mouth. This is why businesses spend a lot of time and money figuring out their target audience and why they use special deals, social media, and specific ads to reach them.
Steps To Define Your Target Market
Now that you know more about target markets, let’s go through how businesses can figure out who their target audience is.
- Research your market: The first step is to learn as much as you can about the people you want to serve. The better you understand your audience and what they care about, the easier it will be to adjust your marketing and products to meet their needs.
- Segment your market: Once you know who your potential customers are, break them down into smaller groups. This helps you send specific messages to each group that they’ll actually care about.
- Set your target customers: Now that you know who your business is serving, decide which groups you’ll focus on the most and who you’ll target.
What are Market Segments?
Market segments refer to particular groups of people who are perceived to behave in a certain way due to similarities in their characteristics. Thus, differences in income, religious inclinations, marital status, geographical regions, and so forth play a major role in the spending habits of these market segments.
It is common to expect that those who belong to the same or similar segments will consume comparable products and services. This is the reason why instead of offering a single product to the masses, the market is divided into several segments.
For example, those earning more may find it inappropriate to purchase cheap hot coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and would rather buy expensively from Starbucks. This is important for both companies on what region to start opening stores, what products to stock, and how to market them.
Conclusion
Finding the target market is an important step when creating and improving a new product. If you’re still confused about where to start, we at Optinmark, the best digital marketing agency, can help you break down and clear up your confusions. A target market is basically a description of the people who are most likely to buy the product. This description includes four key factors: where they live (geographic), their age and income (demographic), their interests and lifestyle (psychographic), and how they act when buying (behavioral). These factors help figure out who will want to buy the product.
