Marketing Strategy Before Tactics – Identifying Your Target Market

Every week I encounter businesses that hope to improve their sales and marketing results by redesigning their website, optimizing it for the search engines, or jumping headfirst into social media.  While these are often great tactical ideas and something that every company needs to do sooner or later, these efforts will not be effective if the company has not done the necessary strategic work beforehand.

What do I mean by strategic marketing?  Well, before you do anything, you need to determine who your ideal target client is.  Discovering your target market and then building a marketing machine that will give those clients what they want is the basic premise of all good marketing programs.

There are essentially two ways that small business owners can go about defining their target markets.  The first is to simply take a look at who your customers are now and decide which of those you would like to attract more of.  Companies that undergo this obvious exercise are frequently surprised to find out who their best customers really are.

The second way is through research using a professional research firm, internet census data, telephone surveys or interviews with other business owners who products or services that complement what your business has to offer.

Once you discover your ideal target market you must define them in a way that is easy to understand.  It must be easy enough to explain to everyone who could potentially refer business to you:  your employees, your customers, your bank, your vendors and those you network with.

One of the biggest benefits of clearly defining your target market is knowing who your target market isn’t.  Too often small business owners make the mistake of working with anyone who will pay them.  Invariably, this creates problems and headaches that could have been avoided.  By identifying who the type of customer who really values your services, you have the ability to focus all of your prospecting and sales energy on finding that ideal client who will repay you with testimonials and referrals.

Focusing your sales and marketing on a more narrowly defined ideal client is the absolute best way to grow your business.

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