Why Your Marketing Message Needs A Clearly Defined Target Market

Posted on August 12, 2021 by Susan Giddings, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

The most crucial step in creating an effective marketing message is identifying your target market. Your message needs to speak directly to their needs and explain how your product or service meets these needs.

How it does this is the single biggest factor that determines the success or failure of your marketing. So, if your marketing isn’t working, it could be because you haven’t yet defined your target market clearly enough.

What Is a Target Market?

A target market is a set of individuals who share common characteristics. A person in this group is the ideal end user for the products or services you offer. In other words, this is the group of people who can best use what you’re offering.

It’s important to define who this group is so you can craft your message just for them.

Give Your Message Focus

The right targeting gives your message focus. You can’t be all things to all people and if you try to be everything for everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one.

Casting your net too wide will bring in prospects who won’t eventually buy. You’ll waste time and effort nurturing these leads with no result.

Targeting tightens up your message so that from the very beginning, you’re only spending time on people who will actually benefit from using your product or service.

Specificity – They’re Speaking to ME

Your prospective buyer is looking for a message that resonates. They’re skimming their social media news feed distractedly and ignoring most of what they see there.

How do you make your content stand out?

Through targeting a specific set of people and studying them, you deeply understand the interests of the people you want to reach. You can figure out how to create compelling content that grabs their attention and draws them in.

Targeting helps you set yourself apart from the millions of other messages they receive every day.

Addressing Pain Points

The most important thing to know about your audience is their pain points. You have to understand what problems they face so that you can show them your product is the solution.

Targeting helps you clearly understand what this pain is and how you can address it.

Targeting is Essential Marketing Research

Before you invest a great deal of time and energy into a marketing campaign, you need to make sure there actually is a market for your product. The research that goes into building a customer profile helps to clarify that this market exists and how much opportunity there is there.

This is also essential if you’re seeking funding for your campaign.

Refining Your Target

Through this research you should refine your target market. You may start out with a general idea only to discover that there is an under-served segment of the market you can target.

You can then adjust your marketing for a smaller segment of the population where you can get more results with less effort.

The First Step: Your Customer Profile

How do you successfully target your market? It starts with creating a customer profile. This profile contains demographic data and information on their values, tastes, needs, and pain points. It describes all of this in terms of one single individual who most needs your product.

This is the first step of any successful marketing campaign.