Having a target market is time tested for driving successful marketing campaigns. Essentially, the target market is the identified perfect customer or client for a business.

If there is no target market, then there’s no direction whatsoever. The first step to defining a target market is to assess what exactly your business is offering, and then looking around to see which group of people or organisations would benefit most from those products.

Defining a target market comes down to looking at specific traits, trends and patterns of a variety of things, ranging from consumer behaviour to environmental factors (e.g. economic climate). Three categorical terms for these are: demographic, psychographic and geographic. These are the three primary ways of finding your target market.

Once you are aware of who to target for your products or services, then you can come up with a plan to reach them, make them aware of you and see you as advantageous to their needs. Once this is achieved, then it’s about obtaining conversion rates.

If you smother an entire consumer audience with a single sales message, then a good majority of potential customers will be lost because there is no appeal or reason to connect with your products and brand.

If you target your market with comprehensive research, then it will be a far less costly (both time and money) initiative to communicate your products or services, and get the results you want much more efficiently.

Streamlining marketing tactics goes a long way to having a focused strategy, and return on investment will be a lot sweeter for your business.