How to Define and Analyze Your Target Market

2. Why socioeconomics matter in target markets

Once you know where your market is located, you need to research its socioeconomic makeup. Your potential customer base’s financial status will help you decide upon price-points, and their spending habits can shape your marketing techniques.

The product or service your business provides must be compatible with the socio-economic outlook of your target market. If it isn’t, you will struggle to make a consistent profit.

Use statistical research to ascertain the market’s potential disposable income and the results of online surveys to discover their spending habits and traits. How a market spends its money is as important as the amount they have to spend. With a wealth of socioeconomic information, you can tailor your product and its marketing more efficiently and take advantage of the prevailing societal conditions.

All of this to say that your target market may be defined by isolating one or more groups of users by running a market segmentation.

The results could inform your business strategy from marketing to product development as you respond to these unique user groups’ specific needs.

3. Opportunities in target marketing Online Communities

Each market can consist of any number of individual communities. A key component of comprehensive market research is identifying those groups and their relevance to your brand.

Social media is often a great place to start researching market communities as users naturally separate themselves into self-identifying groups.

Peruse as many different sources as possible to create a list of different communities and divide them by their individual demographics and characteristics. When it comes to launching a marketing campaign, the more nuanced information you have at your disposal, the more accurately you will be able to tailor your efforts.

4. How to analyze your target market with brand tracking

Identifying trends is an important element of market research and should be ongoing. Purchasing habits change as communities develop and society evolves, so staying informed is imperative to your success.

The best way to stay abreast of any developments is conduct on-going feedback surveys or brand tracking studies with users and relevant communities. The simple act of interacting with your target market will enable organic exposure to any natural trends.

The key to exploiting patterns is to:

• Act quickly upon the information you receive, so stay alert and be adaptable.
• Assess each trend on its own merits and consider how it could be relevant to your own product or service.

Defining a target market is a crucial part of business development that has a lasting effect on profitability and growth.  By dividing the process into these four elements, we find the benefit of compartmentalizing the steps into segments that are easy to manage and review.

The process doesn’t need to be difficult, and a business with a well-defined and researched target market will have a far greater chance of success than one without.