Target market analysis is one area of Internet marketing that is often overlooked or only briefly mentioned, but it is a vital part of setting up a marketing strategy. If it is done correctly, you will find the exact customer you need to market to and your sales will explode. Here are some target market analysis questions to guide you in finding your ideal customer base. By narrowing down your market you will know what target market advertising to use and who you are really talking to. 1. Is your ideal customer female or male? 2. What type of job profile does your perfect customer fit into? Are they an executive dealing with a number of employees or a stay-at-home mother raising children? 3. Where does the ideal customer shop for this product? Do they look for it on the Internet, off-line or both? 4. Is this product or service going to be used as a gift or for the customers themselves? 5. What is the income level of the customer that would like this product? 6. Is this product or service needed for a one-time use or is it needed repeatedly? 7. What would be the income level of the perfect customer? 8. Is this something that is needed, or something that is wanted? 9. What age range are you targeting? When you go through this list of questions, you can see for yourself where this is heading. You can make a mental image of the customer you are addressing and be better able to start a marketing campaign based on what you see. Target Market Analysis: Case # 1 Let's take for example men’s electric shavers. You're going to start a new website about men's electric shavers and point your customers to Amazon or eBay to do some shopping. At this point you can narrow down your target audience very easily. Quite obviously, in this case, you are going to be talking to men. They will be of any age range (except children), they can be from any income level and they can have any job profile. It is something that is needed to keep a man groomed, and it is only something that he will need to purchase once in a while. Since it is something that can be used as a gift, you may want to look at targeting women during the Christmas season, since many of them will be purchasing these shavers for their husbands at this time of the year. When Father’s Day comes around, you can market to wives and older children. It doesn’t matter what the product or service is that you are offering. You can define your market very easily by using this list, and you can also use it to help brainstorm marketing ideas. This list is pure gold when you use it to narrow down your customer base and look for ideas. You can see that you have a wide audience for this shaver product, and as long as you remember that you are targeting men, most of the year, you should be able to find buyers. Target Market Analysis: Case # 2 Now let's take a not so obvious product and break it down further. If you take the example of weight loss, and want to sell a new diet pill, then you may have to do some investigation to narrow down your target audience. The first thing you should do is find out whether more women than men take diet pills, or vice versa, or whether they both seem to take them equally. If you find out that one gender takes them much more than the other then you have narrowed your market down to 50% of the population. This is good. To find out most of this information, all you need to do is look at forums. For the weight loss pill, you need to find forums where this actual pill is discussed. It is then just a matter of looking at the details of the posters. Is it men or women engaging in this topic? You will find out a lot at forums. You may think that a diet pill is something that people would just want to help them lose weight, yet find out from the forum that there are people that feel that they desperately need this diet pill. You may find posters there that believe that if they don't get their hands on this pill, they will never lose weight. You can find out who your target market is and what they are thinking by reading posts at a forum and really listening to what is being said. Sometimes you can even find out their age, education levels and job positions by looking at their profiles. You can really make a marketing explosion if you know who you are talking to and what they really want. Take some time to do some digging and find out more about the types of people that are buying your products. In your pursuit of doing target market analysis, you can even start investigating some market survey sites to see if there have been studies on your product that show what kinds of people are buying it. You’ll be surprised at what has been surveyed and at times very surprised by the results as well.
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