Defining your target market is the key to shaping your entire marketing strategy. Knowing who you intend to assist can help to differentiate your business from the competition, tailor your marketing efforts to better meet customer needs and potentially boost sales. Taking the time to identify and understand your particular niche audience can help you dominate it.

A broad target market that tries to appeal to everybody can get lost amongst the crowd. Demographics, such as age, gender, income and occupation, do not necessarily provide enough insight into the attributes of your target customer.

When constructing your market profile, narrow down the typical customer by looking closely at the psychographic, geographic and behavioural characteristics. This can help further develop the vision of your target market.

Psychographics:
Categorising your target market through psychographics uses personality and interests to define your target customer. Psychographics analyses variables such as lifestyle, attitude, values, personality traits, social class, activities and opinions. This explains the “why” element of why your customers want your product. Often closely related to demographics, combining the two forms of data collection can build a complete, sophisticated profile of consumers based on a more detailed picture of who they really are.

Geographics:
Segmenting your target customer through geographics involves considering what continent, country, city or town they may live in. It can also further studies by looking into specific neighbourhoods, the size of that area and even the climate. Geographics require far less personal data and can be performed simply with a map of the area in question. This form of analysis is quite general so it is best when used in conjunction with other methods.

Behavioural:
Behavioural segmentation involves your target customer’s behaviour towards your products or services. This format looks at customers based on what benefits they desire, how often they will use your product or service, loyalty to your brand, readiness to buy your products/services, or if your products/services are used for a specific occasion such as a holiday or an event.