Knowing your Target Market for Brand Success

When you’re branding your business, or any business for that matter, knowing yourself is just the first step in a successful brand but knowing your audience, or better yet getting knowing your target market is even more important.

Who is you’re your target market?

When we’re helping our clients brand their business, the first thing we ask is “Who is your target market?” and “Who is your product directed to?”

We thought they were easy questions when we first started our business but over the years we found that many entrepreneurs can get quite confused.  Too often we hear, that everyone can be their customer or for b-to-b’s sometimes people get confused who the real target is.

Without knowing who your end target user is and the demographic of your customer you won’t know how to shape your brand for maximum impact.  There’s an old saying that states, if you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone.

That said a successful brand needs to be targeted to someone, somewhere.  By that we mean, you need to have a target audience or target market and you need to know who they are, what they like and more.

Knowing who your target market is, who they are and how they think may just be the difference between brand success and brand failure.

This blog has been designed to make you think more about whom your brand is targeted to and to get you to consider what it is about them that you’re going to focus on to make them want your product or service… your brand.

You need to know everything you can about your target audience for many reasons.  Below are just a few questions you want to answer:

• Is your product designed for a man or woman?  – This may not be that important if you’re a financial brand but if you’re a product, you’ll need to know the difference between their two different types of shopping styles.
• How old are they? – are your customers preparing for retirement are they heading back to school?  College, High School are younger?
• Are they married, if so do they have kids?  Is your product designed for the parents to buy for the kids?
• What do they do for fun?  Do they go to the movies, stay home and watch TV or get on the computer or do they travel?
• How much money do they make, what is their income bracket?
• What is the highest level of education?  Depending on how much formal education they have, you may want to tailor the advertising and verbiage of your ads.
• Where do they get their information from?  Do they watch a lot of TV or do they read magazines, where would they come in contact with your ads?
• What other products or services do they use?  If you know what other brands they like, this will give you a heads up to what they like in advertising and style.
• What do they do for a living?  Knowing where they work and what they do, will give you a great idea of what their life is like.

These are just some of the questions you should know about your target audience, outside of the fact that you need to know that you need one, but they are surely not all of the questions.

You need to know everything you can about who your brand is targeted to because the more you know the better you can tailor your product or services to them.  This goes for the packaging, advertisements, look and feel of your product everything comes down to how well you know your target market!

What other questions could you ask to help people figure out who their target market is?  We’d love to hear what other questions you thought of, please post them below!