Want to know how to grow your business and profits?
Let me ask you this:
What do your products or services do for your customers to make their life easier or better?
What value do you add to your customers?
You may know what you think makes your products or services great. But what many business owners fail to realize is that your customers perceive your business from a very different perspective. Customers are smart and they have heard most of it before.
Best service, unbeatable quality, lowest prices – describes most businesses in the yellow pages. Unless you can get a customer’s attention in the first place, they won’t be making any contribution to your profits. The key to getting your customer’s attention is as simple as getting to know them, how they think, how they act and what is important to them.
No business has the resources to find this out about everyone. But if you target a specific audience you can find out how to get the attention of people that will be willing to spend money with your company. That’s how you’ll increase your profits.
Why a Niche and Target Market is So Important
Focusing on a target market is probably one of the most critical elements of running your business. It is also sometimes one of the hardest things to do. There is always a level of risk involved. What if you miss the mark? Chase after the wrong audience?
Make the wrong match for your target market? Many business owners may be experts in their industries, but the area of marketing is a bit daunting. As a result they tend to err on the side of caution and prefer to have general marketing messages that simply focus on offering a quality product or services. Some people throw money at advertising campaigns without qualifying their audience or knowing how to measure the results of the campaign.
Simply put, that is not exercising smart business sense. If you follow the process of defining your target market, create marketing messages to meet their needs, and test your marketing efforts you will be optimizing your resources. The chances are that you will be able to see a tangible return on your advertising investment and a real growth in your customers and revenue. Most importantly you will be differentiating your business from the competition and giving customers a reason to do business with you.
What Targeting a Specific Market Can Do for Your Business?
- You will be speaking directly to your customers and creating a connection with them.
- You will be addressing a need or want that is specific to your customers.
- You will be giving customers a reason to come to you because your products or services offer a solution to a problem they might be experiencing.
- You will be setting your business up to become known as an industry expert or leader.
- You will be providing your customers with something that is of real value to them.
- You will be optimizing the money you spend on marketing promotions and advertising.
- You will be creating an opportunity to develop customer loyalty.
- You will be able to create a clear identity of your business in the market place.
Everyone in business wants to increase profits, and there are many ways in which you can achieve this.
Increase revenue, increase margins, decrease operational costs, or optimize marketing costs. All of these strategies can be very effective, but if they are not implemented with a target market in mind it is like shooting in the dark or having a shot gun approach. You may get one customer but you will miss out on several other valuable customers. Only in clearly defining your target market can you be sure that the strategies you implement will make a distinctive difference to your business.
