“Faith is essential in your success. Faith is needed in almost every area of our lives: work, projects, and small business endeavors,” – Alex Cook
Any business wanting to grow is always deliberating over how to best promote and reach new customers or to boost revenue from existing customers. For marketing to be truly effective, it is important that your business has a clearly defined target market.
If you ask many entrepreneurs who their customers are, they will say “everyone.” No business can effectively market to everyone.
Have you ever seen a Coca-Cola advertisement on TV featuring a group of 80 year olds drinking Coke? Doubtful. That’s not to say that 80 year olds never drink Coca-Cola, but merely that they are not the target audience.
A target market consists of a group of customers (people or businesses) to whom the seller directs a marketing strategy or program. It is difficult to create an effective marketing program if you don’t understand the needs, wants and desires of your core customers.
You may also have a few different strategies for different target groups. At our education business, Wealth with Purpose, we have three distinct target markets. There are some overlapping characteristics but for the most part they are different. Our target markets are:
You will notice that the first group, individual Christians is very large; so we break this down further into:
In order to reach them effectively and meet their needs or wants, you must first know your customers:
It is the strategy that divides a broad target market into subsets of consumers, businesses, regions or another pre-defined category which have similar needs and priorities. Then, you are able to design and implement marketing strategies to target them.
You must determine their behaviour towards your product. What benefits can the product offer customers to make it desirable? What is the expected usage rate?
Market segmentation also involves finding the type of market you will be in as well as the size of the customer base.
Finally, you must identify the buying situation of your customers. What are their lifestyles? What can they afford?
Below are some of the different ways you can segment you customer base.
There is no real limit to how you segment your potential customer groups. It is a crucial exercise to ensure you have a true understanding of who your customers really are and how to effectively communicate with them. It is particularly powerful for focusing marketing efforts around a specific ‘niche’. That is the group you really want to have as customers and can really benefit from your product or service.
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