subject: Identifying Your Target Customers for Better Profit [print this page] Many people have huge budget for advertising and promotion to build their business. They believe that the advertisement spend will give them sales revenues. This is not true at all. You can build your markets and customer base if you have a solid marketing and sales plan, work from the grass root level, good product and persistence will take you where you wish to go.
The first basic criteria would be to identify the potential customer base and profile them. The niche segment has to be identified and characteristics and buyer behavior understood to be able to move forward. If you are selling baby cereals obviously teenagers would not be your customers but parents would be the target customers.
Targeting and identified the customer, plotting data on the size of the customer base, understanding their profiles, noting their habits and lifestyle coupled with their spend and income are all necessary to be able to target the niche customer segment. If you are promoting fashion accessories in your store, you would be interested in targeting only a certain group based on age, income and style that would be interested in your products. This helps you focus and reach out to them alone.
Depending upon your business and product, the customer profiling would have to be carried out in minute detailing to help you isolate the probably target customer base from others. For example if you are planning to stock only party wear of certain size, then you would obviously have to profile only those women who fit into the size, of the right age, those who are likely to socialize and go partying, those who can afford to buy the dresses etc and leave out the others of the same age but who may not be socializing at all.
What ever be your business, whether you are servicing only local market or targeting national and international markets, promoting your product to the right audience and knowing who and where these right audience are situated is critical to your marketing plan.
Quite often we make mistake of spending the money on advertisements in places where it is not necessary and does not target the specific audience. We could be selling a baby product in a men's style magazine that is of no use. It is a waste of money. Rather advertising sports wear in men's style magazine would be the right target segment for the product.
Identifying Your Target Customers for Better Profit
