Hitting your Target

Target Markets

This is an area of marketing that a lot of SME’s struggle to adapt in a meaningful and helpful way. Most have heard the term and they understand the concept, why it’s important and yet they don’t implement it, at least not in a way that actually helps them get more of the right kind of customers.

A lot of SME leaders I speak with tell me they understand the concept and yet they do not implement it, actions speak louder than words, if you want to know if someone really believes that something is helpful, look at what they are doing not at what they are saying.

So why is this?

Well as with anything there are as many reasons as there are the people trying to understand it, but I think a fair proportion of the cause comes down to the complicated way a lot of articles and books try to explain it.

Target Market, Target Customers, Customer Personas, Customer Avatars, Buyer Personas, audience persona, or marketing persona.

Each one has a slightly different meaning, and each article has a slightly different way of explaining what they mean and how to go about creating them, I am not saying that all of these do not have their place, they absolutely do have their place and yet the journey towards this level of intricacy in marketing has to start somewhere.

For most of you in the SME arena it simply means who buys from you, at your full price, who pays on time, is genuinely happy with your service, who is a loyal customer, recommends you to others and ideally purchases from you often.

That’s your target market, and as for a persona, start with simply describing that customer, you can have as many favourite customers as you like and as many target markets as you need, yet is you want your marketing to be successful it needs to get the attention of someone that would buy from you, it needs to interest them enough that they take notice of you, it needs to get them to want what you have to offer and get some kind of action to happen. This makes marketing is all about communication, and communication is all about speaking in a way that resonates with the people you want to attract, and you can only do that if you have a pretty good idea of who that is, what is important to them and what makes them want to speak with someone like you.

Work out who your favourite customers are, the ones that are profitable for you, the ones you look forward to doing business with and you are well on the way to working out who you should be trying to attract.

If you want to talk about your specific issues around this get in touch.