How Identifying Your Potential Customers Can Ease Your Marketing pain.
March 22, 2018
Up to 80% of all new job creation comes from small businesses. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Helping small business grow creates more jobs and more wealth dispersion rather than helping a large enterprise grow.
Small businesses range from bakeries, restaurants, small grocery stores, small-scale manufacturing, and even internet-based businesses such as web design and computer programming. Anyone who decides to start a small business is called an “entrepreneur”.
An example of a well-known entrepreneur is Bill Gates. In 1975, he started a company called Microsoft alongside fellow entrepreneur Paul Allen.
Microsoft initially started out as a “small business”, but it quickly grew into the multinational technology company that you know today.
As of 2017, Microsoft has an annual revenue of more than $85 billion and over 100,000 employees around the world. Although Microsoft is an excellent example of what happens when a small business becomes successful, it’s not the norm.
In fact, as much as 96% of small business fail within the first five years of operation. Many of those entrepreneurs end up opening new businesses when one when one fails. Like many things in life, failure happens and the key is to keep moving.
There are many reasons why businesses fail, but the two most common reasons are a lack of marketing and bad financial planning. Marketers play a vital role in helping business succeed. Without marketers, it’s impossible for businesses to grow - no matter how great their products and service are.
Small businesses can’t market to everyone. That’s why it’s important to have a well-defined target market that clearly identifies the ideal customer. A lot of business owners may say that their target market is small business owners, homeowners, or stay at home moms. All these target markets are too general.
An ideal target audience has to be specific. For example, a shoe company could actually choose to market young men between the age of 35 and 45 with income of #250,000 and above in Lagos.
Focusing on a specific target market allows small businesses to use their marketing budget and brand messaging in a specific market that is more likely to buy from them rather than their competitors.
By identifying a target market, businesses can reach potential clients will less stress.
A common method of identifying a target market is to list the benefit of your product or service and then draw out a list of people who you think have a need that your product or service will be useful for.
For example, a fashion designer that sew female clothes could choose to target all women interested in sewing a new outfit because their services match the goals of their target market.
In this case, targeting all women interested in sewing new outfit is still too general, but it’s a good starting point.
Once you have identified a general target market, the next step is to conduct a market research and choose specific demographics to target. You should look at the following demographics: age, location, gender, income, education level, occupation and marital status in some cases you could consider the sex.
The more detail you can collect about your target market, the more effective your marketing strategy will be. What you also need to consider is the psychographics of your target market, this includes personality, attitudes, values, interest/hobbies, lifestyles and behavior.
A target market should be considerably large and targeted at the same time, if you find out that your target market is low due to the criteria you have selected, then it is better to create another target market.
A good place to find more information about a target market is to look for magazine articles and blogs that appeal to your targeted market. You can also search for blogs and forum where people in the target market communicate their opinions.
Apart from that, you can also conduct surveys and research to define your target audience. Another method you could use is to ask your current customers for feedback, they will tell you different things about them and why they actually chose your business, look for what is similar in their responses and use the information to define your target audience.
Once you have been able to identify a specific target market, it will help you in creating a better marketing message and get a better return on investment on your marketing efforts.
CONCLUSION
Marketing is one of the major reason why small businesses fail, not that they don’t do marketing at all but they are actually doing it wrong. Marketing failure starts with you not able to identify who needs your product or service. It is better to spend much of your marketing effort on identifying your potential customers as it will drive success to your business.
2 comments
Thanks for this great post
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