What is a target market and how to define yours

Increase your sales with targeted messaging and effective communication. Learn what a target market is, what it means and how to find the right one for your business in this article.

We’ll cover the main elements your business needs to consider to start building more meaningful connections with customers. Discover:

• What a target market is
• How to find and define your target market
• How to market to your targeted market
• How to gain time to tailor your marketing with Countingup

A target market is the portion of consumers that a product or service has the potential to be popular with. This popularity can be driven by a number of factors. These include genuine need (like goods aimed at solving problems), personal taste (fashion items or lifestyle brands) or trends that grow within a certain demographic.

The relevancy of targeted marketing has almost never been higher. Recently, around 90% of consumers stated they disliked receiving generic marketing messages – a consistent pattern observed across nearly all age groups. It’s therefore vital that you make sure your advertising reaches as many people interested in your product as possible. Otherwise you risk wasting time and money, only to be rejected by people who you were never going to attract in the first place. 

To avoid this problem, businesses conduct consumer and market research to build consumer profiles that represent a typical customer. This helps businesses take the perspective of the people who are buying from them, and can tailor their marketing to best impress them.

There are lots of ways of doing market research, with each method’s author telling you that their way is the best. Defining a target market is all about finding out who your customer is. Consider answering the following questions as a prompt for characterising your customer best:

What does your customer gain from your business and what sort of person is it most relevant to? Answering this question should be fairly straightforward as you know your product or service well. 

Answering this question should give you an idea about the surface level information of your typical target customers. This should include age, location, education level, preferred tone of voice, what worries them, and finally, their goals and values for how they live their lives or run their business.

Each of these are important aspects because they will inform your later marketing efforts. These data will help you place and frame your marketing messages in a way that best delivers your sales pitch.

This question concerns things about your customer, like where they get their information from and where they like to spend their time, including online.

This can help you gauge their interests in order to appear in relevant places. For example, your business might want to have billboard advertising within a certain local area. Or maybe you want to show your business’ advertising online – but only for customers interested in the hashtag ‘home renovations’. 

This question is critical for your own processes: during your sales process, what sort of issues do your customers struggle to overcome? What sort of information or delivery can help remove this?

For example, some customers have concerns about price and value. Others are more sensitive about being prepared for the future, having guaranteed fun or having something available quickly enough. Therefore, how can you frame your messaging during your sales process to reflect their concerns?

Advertising to everyone is not only costly, it’s also clumsy – no one business or product is universally loved or relevant to everyone. Your marketing efforts will be more effective as you create more focused and specific customer profiles. Below we discuss how to use all this information during your marketing. 

We have a number of marketing guides available below. You can use them to understand the basics of marketing and start sharing meaningful and relevant content to get noticed by customers.

• Social media platform basics
• How to use social media for business
• What is small business marketing?
• Marketing your small business with Facebook and Twitter
• How to advertise a small business locally

As you start, our key piece of advice is to use the information your research has shown about your target market. This is vital so you can easily take the customers’ point of view and understand what will attract them most to your business and no one else’s.  

Well-researched and effective marketing campaigns take time and effort. However, too often, time is lost to other tasks. While Countingup can’t market your business for you, it can take care of your financial admin. 

The Countingup app automates financial admin for business owners, so that you can stay focused on conducting accurate research and creating effective advertising. The business current account and accounting software in one app allows thousands of businesses across the UK to save time and money on bookkeeping tasks. 

With the app’s automated invoicing tools and handy receipt capture, you can be confident that your financial records are accurate. And with real-time profit and loss data, you’ll be able to instantly understand where your marketing efforts are beginning to pay off. 

Gain complete confidence in your books and save time with the Countingup app. Find out more here and sign up for free today.