Target Market: Definition & Examples

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A target market is an identifiable group of people that have shared characteristics. This group is the most likely to make a purchase of your product or service. 
• Being able to identify your target market is critical to the implementation and success of your marketing campaign. 
• A target market can get broken into common types of segments, such as age, gender, race, location, and career.

What Is a Target Market? 

A target market is a specifically designated group of customers that you want to get your product or service in front of. It starts by determining the industry that you’re in and segmenting further into the broader market it covers. Some of the biggest factors taken into account include geographic location, behavioral tendencies, and unique demographic characteristics. 

Basically, a target market is a group of people who have similar characteristics. You identify these characteristics as the ideal fit for your product or service. This is all important information to understand as it’s going to translate into specific areas such as your investment in marketing. 

The way you design, market, and package your product will all get based on your target market. You want to provide what they want, in the way they want it, and how they want it. There can also be other characteristics and demographics to consider. These can include the customer’s stage of life, their interests and hobbies, and the career they have. 

A product rarely gets designed to appeal to absolutely everybody. So, a primary driver of the success of a product or service is by knowing exactly who it will appeal to and who is going to purchase it. And user bases grow and expand over time through marketing and advertising efforts. 

That’s why businesses are likely to spend large amounts of time and money to help define their initial target markets. From here, they can take it even further with things like social media campaigns, specialized advertising, and special offers. 

How Do You Analyze Your Target Market? 

There are certain things that you can do to better understand and analyze your target market. By analyzing your target market, it sets the foundation for determining who and where they are. Here are some common steps you can follow to do this. 

Look Into Your Competition 

By performing an analysis of your competition, you can get a better sense of who they’re targeting and why. Look into their primary customer base and see if there’s a portion of the market they might be missing that you could capitalize on. 

An effective way to do this is through a competitive analysis. Analyze who your competition is, the products and services they offer, and some of the sales and marketing strategies they use. Knowing this information can highlight gaps in the market that you could fill. 

Analyze the Product or Service You Offer 

What value are consumers going to get out of your product or service? What needs do they fill? Are there problems or customer pain points that they resolve? Who is going to benefit most? 

These are all excellent questions to ask yourself and you can even get feedback from some of your current customers. This can provide additional insights into areas for improvement. The key takeaway here is that by analyzing your own product or service, you can better understand the target market you want to focus on. 

It will highlight any potential disconnects or areas that aren’t delivering the solutions a customer wants. This way, you can better align your product or service to your ideal target market.

Determine How You’re Going to Segment Your Market

The most common ways to segment a target market are by certain geographic, behavioral, and demographic factors. At its core, this is essentially the way in which you create your ideal buyer personas. 

Keep in mind that your type of product or service and your industry are going to play a role. Here are some other common characteristics to segment your target market and ideal customer.

• General interests
• Values
• Lifestyle
• Location
• Income bracket and annual income
• Age
• Gender 
• Marital status
• Family size

Conduct the Right Research 

Now that you have started to narrow in on your ideal target market, it’s time to conduct some effective research. For example, what’s the marketing strategy that will be most beneficial to reach your target market? Is the market you’re targeting a good fit for the product or service you offer? 

It’s a critical step to make sure you choose the right target market, as you don’t want to waste valuable time and effort getting in front of the wrong audience. 

Monitor, Track, and Evaluate the Results 

Target markets can be a fluid and evolving process, they’re rarely going to stay static. It’s going to be an ongoing process to ensure that your audience is still benefiting from and finding value in your product or service. So, it’s important to monitor, track, and evaluate the results that you’re seeing. 

This way, your advertising strategy and additional marketing methods are maximized. 

What Is an Example of a Target Market? 

Let’s say that you’re a software as a service company that wants to expand its distribution channels. One of the first things you’re going to want to do is determine where your product is going to be most successful. This is going to include conducting research to identify who your primary target market is. 

After conducting the research, you determine that the consumers most likely to purchase your product are both men and women aged between 30 and 50 years old and are based in the United States. From here, you can come up with a marketing strategy and advertising efforts to appeal to your new target market. 

Then, after conducting additional research as to where these consumers are most active, you tailor your strategy around social media and traditional advertising. After a few tweaks and changes to align properly with the segmentation, you have found and appealed to your target market. 

Target Market Segmentation 

By undergoing target market segmentation, you’re going to be able to narrow in on your target audience. It’s a way to create more identifiable and approachable audiences. And there are several ways that you can do this. Let’s take a closer look.

• Demographic segmentation: This gets done by separating your target market based on things like education, race, gender, income, or occupation. 

• Behavioral segmentation: This gets done by dividing your target market into different decision-making patterns and behavioral tendencies. 

• Firmographic segmentation: This is a practice primarily that divides the target market based on company size or the number of employees they have. 

• Geographic segmentation: This gets done by dividing your target market based on their specific geographical boundaries and location. 

Summary

Understanding who your target market is will contribute to the overall success of your product or service. There’s no sense in spending time and effort marketing something to an audience that isn’t the ideal fit for what you’re offering. 

Plus, the way that you market, design, and package your product or service is going to get determined by your target market. It’s not often that a product or service will appeal to everyone, so ensuring you’re getting it in front of the ideal audience is critical. 

It’s important to consider things like interests, values, location, income level, age, and gender when identifying your target market. Knowing these details will allow you to create a more effective marketing strategy to maximize your results.