Having made a successful start to your business, you might want to immediately start working on your marketing plan or if you already have one in place, might want to start implementing it. After all, you say to yourself, you know what your product has to offer. It is just a matter of getting a good sales force together and contacting prospective customers.
Do you know where the prospective customers are going to come from?
Ideally, you should have conducted some kind of market research as part of your business plan and before actually launching your business. This would have given you a very clear idea of the kind of market you are looking at, the demand that exists for a product of the kind you are hoping to sell and what the rough demographics of your target market is.
Even if you did not have the time or resources to conduct thorough market research then, it is important that you carry this out now before you start your marketing and advertising campaign.
The main goal of the market research:
The main goal of this market research is to make sure that your business staff and you know the specific demographics the product is targeted for and what the needs of that group are so that you can work out how you should be conveying the idea that your product can more than meet these needs. Despite being aware of this very crucial factor, the number of businesses who do not make the effort of identifying their target market, though, is staggering.
For example, you may have seen how children’s games and toys clearly mention the age group that they are suitable for. Similarly, even if the packaging may not mention it, many children’s (and other) products target a specific demographic group, one that it believes will be happy to spend money and buy the product or utilize the services, as they meets some of their important requirements like kid’s meals at fast food joints.
And hence your own marketing and promotional campaigns should be focused mainly on a target audience as well.
At times, if you are providing general services or products like legal services or selling personal care products, your ads might span a fairly wide range of prospective customers. Even then it is important to divide the campaigns into different segments based on certain common features and then create different promotional campaigns to reach each segment of your market.
Sometimes, you may have to cater to a very niche market and your campaign has to be more targeted and also more aggressive, since the market is bound to be limited.
Try getting answers to fundamental questions!
In order to know the target market that would be interested in your product or service and the specific demographic groups involved, try getting answers to some fundamental questions like the following:
- What kind of a customer would be interested in my product or service?
- What would the approximate age range be?
- What would the gender, income level, education level and martial status of the typical customer be?
- How will my product or service be of use to them?
- How often will they use it?
- What might convince them to consider buying it – low price, promise of prompt assistance, easy availability?
- Would they consider this a necessity or a luxury item?
- What features would they like most in the product or service and which ones would they like to change?
- Would prospective customers be willing to buy this on an impulse or would they need to research this for some time before making a purchase?
- What are the most common sources of information for your prospective customers – newspapers, Internet, magazines, books, TV?
Based on the feedback that you get, you will know how many segments you can break your target market into and what kind of campaigns you will need for each segment.
Are You Ready to Move on to the Next Section?
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