Marketing Your Business
Step Three: Your Target Market

No matter how much marketing your company has done in the past, it's time to take a step that will help you gain the greatest return for your marketing dollars. This step will help you better understand your customer base, as well as allow you to model your best customers in order to prospect effectively. This step is to define your target market. We'll begin by deciding if your best strategy is to look at "purchasers" or "users".

Your purchaser is the person who actually makes the decision to buy, selects the company to do the work, and writes the checks. Your user is the person who may influence that decision by expressing preference based on their interaction with your product or service. Often, especially in our industry, the purchaser and user are one in the same. So, to determine who your strongest market may be, examine a few key factors: size of the market, who your competition is marketing to, and which group will see greater benefits of what you provide. Finally, analyze your current customer "who is purchasing the most, and why?" (See the April 05 Pipeline for information on Customer Surveys.)

From this information, you should be able to create a group of customers defined by a single set of characteristics, such as female homeowners, aged 35-55, married, living in an owner-occupied home with a value of $160,000 or more. This is your primary target market. If you find that you also have what's called "secondary target market" (say, office park managers of complexes valued at $350,000+), note that for additional campaigns. One of the most important things to remember at this point is that it is difficult - and can be very costly - to attempt to market to multiple groups at the same time.

One thing to note if you do commercial work, is that you may find that a secondary market is a customer who does not purchase heavily from you now, but has a great deal of potential. To see if this is the case, you can estimate your competition's sales to this customer and decide if it makes sense to determine what additional needs your company can fill. If the potential is there, this prospect market may be a good secondary target market.

Once you've completed this review, you can move on to determining your objectives and the strategies that will help you achieve them. By focusing your attention clearly on your primary target market, you have a much greater chance of affecting their behavior and influencing their purchasing habits.