If you fail to properly identify your target market then none of your
marketing will work, period. Not your ads, not your content, not your website, not
your social media, nothing. It'll all just fail miserably
and I don't want that for you which is why in this episode I'm gonna be
breaking down exactly how to identify your target market and give you some
real-life examples so you can use them as reference in your business so you
never make this mistake again. Let's get to it!
Hey there my name is Adam Earhart, marketing strategist and welcome to the
marketing show where we help you grow your business and generate more leads,
customers and sales by making way better marketing. So, if you're interested in
learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks
and tactics, well, you may want to consider subscribing and hitting that
notification bell so you never miss a future episode. Alright, let's talk about
ideal target market and specifically, how to identify your ideal target market,
because if you get this piece wrong, then like I alluded to before well pretty
much nothing else is going to work because this is the core foundational
and key element that all of the rest of your marketing is built on so it's that
important which is why I'm glad you're here now watching this here so allow me
to break down the exact steps so you make sure that you always clearly
identify and isolate and then attract and really find them where they are
online and offline so you can put your message directly in front of them in the
most clear and concise and compelling way possible to get more leads and sales.
Alright, so it all starts with step #1 which is having an ideal
customer avatar. Now, if you've never heard of this before, what an ideal
customer avatar is, is a kind of a composite or a fictional representation
or it could even be built off a real customer that you've had in the past but
essentially this person or this sort of fictional representation makes up your
most perfect and ideal customer, the kind of customers that you absolutely love
doing business with and the ones that love you back, the ones that pay you for
the value you provide, they are not whiners, they don't complain, they don't
make your life miserable, essentially, you want more of these people well in order
to get more of these people you first need to really clearly articulate what
all these people have in common and I'm gonna give you a few frameworks in just
a minute so stick with me, but essentially, what we want to do is we
want to build out three main core principles of your ideal customer avatar,
including their demographic details like: what is their age, their gender, income,
occupation, job title, things like that, their geographic details like: what city
or state or province or country or basically, where they live and then,
there's psychographic details like: their attitudes, their interests, their beliefs,
their organizations or affiliations, maybe even their political or religious
views, all of the these things that sort of make up the
head stuff of your ideal customers. You also really want to dive deep into what
I call their miracles and their miseries. Their miracles being all of their wants
and their dreams and their aspirations and their goals and then their miseries
being all their pains and their frustrations and their fears and their
nightmares, all the things that keep them up laying awake at night when they can't
fall back asleep. The better that you understand them and are able to
articulate their demographic Geographic and psychographic details and the better
that you really understand their miracles and their miseries and how all
these played together, well, the better that you're going to be able to form
this ideal customer avatar which is going to make all of the rest of the
steps that much easier. Now, like I said before, there are some frameworks here
that I want to share with you so let's dive into the first one now. Now, the
first way to really identify an ideal target market that you want to go after
is to look at a framework called the "PvP framework" which basically stands for
personal fulfillment, value to market and profitability. So, let me break down each
one of those for you now. The first P is personal fulfillment and this is
essentially just how much do you enjoy working with this type of market. Do they
share similar values? Do you enjoy helping them? Do they get value from you
helping out? Do you have a good relationship? Do you enjoy talking with them? Do you have
shared interests? That type of thing. See, it's probably no surprise that you're
going to be able to do a lot better and you're going to be able to attract a lot
higher quality customer and someone that you actually enjoy working with if you
actually enjoy working with them and you've got similar characteristics or
commonalities or you're able to empathize with them and really kind of
get on the same page. The next letter is V and this is all about Value to market
or value to market place. Basically, is the product or the service or the offer
that you're putting out there of a high perceived value to the customer that
you're trying to serve. Basically, if you've got something that's going to be
really valuable to a certain segment of people you're gonna probably want to
serve them, rather than different segments of people who may have no
interest at all and what you're trying to sell. A good example here, and
basically just cuz I've got one on the wall, would be say guitar strings. Now, if
you're trying to sell guitar strings to me, I'm gonna be interested and it's
gonna provide a lot of value to me because I'm gonna need them for my
guitar. But, if you try to sell them to some of my friends who don't play guitar
there's gonna be pretty much no value at all. Unless, of course, they're nice and
just want to buy me some strings. Alright, moving right along to the third
letter, which is P and this is all about
profitability. This one is kind of obvious and it goes without saying but
hey, let's say it anyways. Basically, profitability is how profitable are
these customers to your business. Basically, when you take a look at all
the different available markets that you could pursue some of which are going to
be in a better position to spend a whole lot more money than other people, meaning
you can probably provide a much higher quality service or product to them. As a
real rough example, let's just look at demographic details like age range, well,
it's probably not surprising that someone who's say still in college or
maybe who's retired and trying to watch what they've trying to spend and trying
to save and basically on to complete opposite ends of the spectrum, they might
have less discretionary or disposable income than say someone right in the
middle of the spectrum, who's in their prime working years and making income
and actively out in the workforce. Doesn't mean that you don't go after
students or retirees, it just means that of those subsets, if we're looking at
things strictly demographically, it's pretty obvious to see which subset is
going to have in general more money to spend. Alright, so that's the PvP,
framework and it's very important to keep in mind and when you start to stack
that on top of your ideal customer avatar framework, looking at demographic,
Geographic and psychographic details, your target market starts to become
really crystallized and starts to become a whole lot easier to identify so you
can go out there and locate them later. But, before we do that, there's another
framework that I want to share with you that can help add even more bang to your
marketing buck and that's the RFM framework. The RFM framework basically,
looks at recency frequency and monetary and it's kind of similar but it's also
kind of different, so let's dive into it now. Basically, what this framework helps
you do is determine which subset or which cohort or which area of your
market is going to be the most valuable to you moving forward. The R stands for
recency. Now, essentially the more recently that someone has bought or done
business with you or a competitor or basically, any kind of similar product,
well, the more valuable they're going to be. After all, if they've just bought
something the odds of them buying something similar or in a similar market
or whatever is basically a lot higher than someone who's never bought it
before or hasn't bought in months or even years. The next letter is F and it's
all about frequency. Basically, if someone buys stuff a lot it's probably no
surprise that they're going to be better customer who's going to be more
likely to buy a whole lot more - I don't think there's too much to say on that
one - and then the M of course, is monetary and this is very similar to the
profitability that we talked about in the PvP framework but basically, the
monetary is, well, how much did they spend and you can see if you've got a customer
that's recently bought they buy frequently and they spend a large amount,
these are the kind of people you want to go after. Alright, so now that I've
broken down the frameworks for you, the next step is to go out there and try to
find these people. How do you do that? How do you identify that ideal target market
Who's gonna love you and love what you do and pay you for the value you provide.
Well, if you've already got a business and you've got some sales under your
belt you're in a great position here, because the very first thing you're
gonna want to do is analyze your current customers. Essentially, we're gonna want
to take a look at the 80/20 distribution or the Pareto principle and basically, we
want to look for the top 20% of your customers which probably, statistically
speaking, are going to be responsible for around 80% of your revenue, depending on
your business. Well, when you analyze this top 20% of customers you're going to
want to look for all of the frameworks that I just talked about. You're gonna
want to look for similarities and commonalities in the demographic details
and Geographic and psychographic details, you're gonna want to look at personal
fulfillment and value to the market and the profitability and of course, RFM
being the recency frequency and monetary and when you lay all these out and you
look at that top 20% of customers you should start to see some trends and some
commonalities between your best customers. Once you do that, well you
pretty much have an ideal target market that you've identified and some
relatively sort of similar characteristics between them, so you can
use this to go out and find more of them. Now, if you don't have a business or if
you're just launching a new product or a new service or a new offer and you don't
have a proven track record of sales basically behind you that you can mine
for data, well you're going to be in a bit of a different position but still,
all of the concepts I shared with you still apply. The alternative, however, to
mining the data that you already have is going out there and getting as much new
data as possible and this means talking to people. Basically, that's it you want
to have a conversation, you want to learn about them, you want to present your
product or your service you want to ask them questions you want to see what
their pains are, you want to see what solutions they're looking for and you
want to make sure that you're basically designing your product and service more
fit the needs of an ideal customer avatar then the other way around.
Let me elaborate on that in just a second. You see, one of the biggest
mistakes you can make in business is to come up with a business or a product or
a service first and then try to fit it into some area of the market and
basically jam it in there rarely is it going to fit perfectly. Some adaptations
and basically tweaks are gonna need to be made better solution is to first at
least even roughly identify some target market some basic sort of generalization
based on some of the criteria that we've already talked about and then try to
design your product or your service or at least tailor it to them rather than
the other way around. Way more profitable, way more fun. Alright, so now that I've
got all of that covered, we've laid everything out on the table let me give
you a couple examples both in the B2C industry, business to consumer and the
B2C industry the business-to-business let's say that you're in the B2B space
and you're selling direct from your business to consumers and you're selling
say a weight-loss supplement, well, let's say also that you've got two different
target markets that you could pursue, we'll call these cohorts and essentially,
what we want to do is we want to clearly identify a target market or an avatar
for each one of these cohorts, so we can make sure that we're positioning our
marketing accordingly. Chort one could be, let's say, men ages 18 to 25, they live
in the U.S., they like CrossFit and Moytie and maybe MMA and bodybuilding, so you
could then use this information to go out there and create a campaign that's
targeting them, speaking their specific language, being on platforms that they're
gonna be active and present on and essentially, making sure that you're
really dialing in your marketing just to focus on them. Another cohort you could
try would be say new moms who are between the ages of say 25 and 35, also
live in the U.S. who might enjoy watching shows like The Biggest Loser,
have probably tried different diets before, including keto or Atkins or paleo
or whatever and basically, are looking for that next solution or that next fix
to help them get where they're trying to go. Again, by clearly dialing in this
cohort and this ideal target market you can really start to structure your
marketing and your messaging and making sure you're ending up in the right
places to get directly in front of these people with your message and with your
product. Alright, and now with B2B or business-to-business example, let's
say that you're selling coaching or consulting services and you're helping
based practitioners grow their businesses, well, for starters you'd
probably want to set some kind of parameters around the business, maybe
they're doing a million a year in revenue or above all. Also, because you're
servicing health based practitioners you'd want to really ideally articulate
kind of what kind of health based practitioners are we talking about
chiropractors or physiotherapists or massage therapists or whatever. When it
comes to demographics, we could be looking at all sorts of different age
ranges but let's say for this one between the ages of 35 and 55. Also, for
psychographic details and who they follow what kind of books they read well
let's say that they enjoy watching TED Talks, they follow Tony Robbins and they
attend one to two seminars each year. Again, these are fictional
representations but they're very important because what they allow you to
do is really get into the mind and into the shoes of your ideal target market,
that person that you're really trying to serve and the better that you're able to
understand what they're going through and where they're coming from, well, the
better your marketing is going to b.e Alright, the next thing you're going to
want to do is make sure to check out the video right here on the six pillars of
marketing strategy, which is going to help ensure that you never create bad
marketing again. So check that out now. Thanks so much for watching and I'll
catch you next time on The Marketing Show.