Simon Paul Thurston

Who is your ideal, target customer?

If you answered ‘everybody’ then I am afraid you are making a massive mistake. The fact is it is impossible for any company to market themselves to everyone, and so if you are doing this right now you need to stop immediately.

Even large companies, FTSE 100 companies that have multiple products and/or services will segment their marketing. Sure, overall you could be marketing your range of products or services to a large percentage of the population, but you simply cannot market everything to everybody.

So, how to you select who your target market is?

Well, a good place to start could be to look at your existing customer base. What similarities do they have? Age? Sex? Income? Location? You see, this is what you need to be thinking about, as it will enable you to become smarter and more effective in your marketing, and ultimately your profitability, as trying to market to all and sundry is like throwing mud at a wall!

Once you have established who your market is, you then need to target them. You need to advertise in places where your market will see you; so this could be newspapers, magazines, trade publications, billboards, the internet, the Yellow Pages – the possibilities are endless.

You could even use direct mail and target a list of prospects. You can buy lists of target prospects that fit a number of criteria that you want to focus on and this is still a great and effective way to develop business if done correctly.

So, we’ve discussed the importance of targeting the right market. In my next post, we’ll look at using the Right Message.