Know your target market
Of course, every business is reliant on sales and one of the most important concepts to embrace is delivering a product or service to your chosen target market.
When you decide to go into business you need to be absolutely clear about who will buy your product and why. You need to be able to identify them with great clarity. The skills and tools required to create an idea are very different to those required to grow market share.
If you are in business, or starting a business, you obviously have a product or service that you think others want to buy. But thinking this and knowing how and why it will happen are two very different things. We need to know who our target market is.
Why is this so important? Because if you’re not shaping your business from the foundations up, focusing on how you can serve your target market, you are going to try to be everything to everyone and actually be no good to anybody. From a strategic point of view, your desired target market directs the cut of your business.
So, who are they?
There are six questions you must be able to answer about your target market. If you can’t answer all of these questions you won’t be able to meet the needs of your target market and you’ll be left wondering why the phone never rings.
These six questions are:
Who is the person or organisation you wish to serve? You need to be able to define them in detail.
Where do they congregate in their greatest concentration? Where are they being influenced?
What is their desired #1 Big Outcome? What is the problem you solve for them?
When is their highest level of frustration? When will they say, ‘I need to buy this from you?’
Why will they choose you? Whatever your product or service, your potential ‘A’ clients have other options available to them.
How do you expect them to do business with you? How do you expect them to communicate, contact and correspond with you?
The more you understand the ‘who, where, what, when, why and how’ of your target market the better you’ll be able to shape your business.
If you don’t know your target market and what they want, the only way you can solve their problems is by getting lucky, and luck is not a strategy for success.
Finally, if I can give you my top three tips in your first year of business, and for all your other years in business for that matter, they would be:
1. Go slow to go fast.
2. 50% of something successful is better than 100% of something that’s not.
3. The five R’s – right people, hired for the right roles, who are clear about their responsibilities, getting paid the right money, will deliver the right results.
When you have clarity, confidence follows. And so does a second year and beyond in business!
Stefan Kazakis is a business strategist, sought-after presenter and speaker and author of the new book, From Deadwood to Diamonds (Major Street Publishing, $29.95). For more information please visit www.stefankazakis.com.
