Working from home lead many businesses and their sales teams to start thinking about better ways to approach the market. Many are tossing around the merits of using Social Media vs phone calling, vs planning a stunning DM campaign after this is all over.
When else do we have time to think?
Did you hit the brick wall of not exactly sure what is the SIZE of your target market and what kind of companies are in your target market?
If the answer is yes, then this article is for you if you if you are one of these special people:
- you want to have more sales
- you want to launch a new product or service
- you want to sell to different businesses
- you dreamed up a new business
Then there is nothing more important than defining your target market.
This is because often B2B products and services are designed for a specific type of business or to address a common business problem. Or at the very least there is a set of users more likely to get value out of it.
Through my years of working with businesses, I’ve seen that many B2B businesses rarely focus on understanding their target market.
All too often businesses assume that their target market is EVERYONE or their target market is too hard to define and identify.
I challenge you to reconsider and embrace the journey to find out who are in your ideal target market.
In other words I suggest you to ask and think once again to understand what kind of companies will benefit the most from your products and services. And then to question: “How many of them you can identify and find”. And remember, help is at hand because we already know over 200,000 business locations nationwide.
The good news is that it’s never too late to have a conversation about your the definition of the ideal target audience for your business!
While the world is changing and businesses are rapidly reviewing the way they operate, it’s an ideal time to sit down and identify who your best customer, your target market, is.
Let’s take it one step at a time starting from the basics.
What exactly does target market or target audience means?
These are the people or businesses you have chosen to target, because
• your product or service is designed for them
• you know your products and services will provide value to their business
Even when you have a product or service that has wide appeal, you will still benefit from creating a persona of your best clients.
Here is an example of good find if you supply stationary, because then you can figure our that an office-based company uses more paper and pens than a manufacturing business.
Another example is if you are in importer, you can decide to bring products that are created for a particular industry.
This is how simple really it is to find out who will be a better target.
What size Target Market is good?
Ideally your audience needs to be of a significant size in order to make your business viable and direct marketing feasible. A significant size will be different for every situation.
A commercial real estate agent may only need a list of twenty prospects to achieve a goal, whereas a stationery supplier may require a list of thousands of business prospects.
In New Zealand the size of your target market is often limited by the number of existing businesses. Depending on the size of the audience you can then choose a direct marketing approach with greater confidence.
Did you know that NZ has the same numbers of businesses per capita as other developed countries? The actual quantity in every specific niche is drastically smaller.
What this means is while overseas if you have a total market size of 10,000 it could be fine for you to know only 2,000 – you may not be able to sell to more than that. But in NZ if the total market size is 2,000, you’ll want to know pretty much all of them to ensure you get enough customers to sustain your business.
That’s why identifying more businesses in your target market should become your priority goal on the way to growing your sales.
Because as you know, in the end, sales is a numbers game.
How Can You Discover Who Is Included In Your Target Market?
If you are already in business you can analyse the characteristics of your top clients to see what makes them outstanding, different, or more desirable than others. This can help you to define your direct marketing audience.
If you are a startup or an existing business introducing something new, then you really need to test different audience characteristics and profiles. You’ll have to end up making some assumptions, and find a way to test these out. Another good place to start is having a chat with a list broker – these companies often have years of experience segmenting data and will be able to provide a starting point.
You can choose to target in many different ways, here are examples:
· By Business Size (by number of employees)
· By Location – which could be by location (City or Town), or street/s, or even building
· By Particular Business Executive (e.g. CEO, HR, Accountant)
· By Industry Classification (using what is called ANZIC Codes)
· By separating Start ups from Established businesses
· By Having a Website or Not
It is very important to take time in defining and refining your target market.
Because the more accurately you can define your target audience/market, the less money you’ll spend marketing to unsuitable companies, and therefore the better your results will be.
Still Not Sure About Your Target Market?
Reach out to either myself or one of my team members through www.whoiswhere.co.nz because we created New Zealand’s largest business list from scratch. Years of data maintenance and data verification plus conversations with 100,000+ businesses made us experts in helping to identify target markets.
We’ll be glad to have a no obligation chat and help you understand your target market.
Discover a heap of resources on our data blog which explain different aspects of data.
Assia Salikhova, Managing Director, E-ideas Ltd
Boutique B2B Marketing Implementation Agency
www.e-ideas.co.nz www.whoiswhere.co.nz nz.kompass.com
DDI +64 4 973 4949 M +64 27 231 8631
For a free report that shows you what business data providers exist in NZ and whom do you need depending on your purpose. Grab a copy of Assia’s “How to Choose a NZ Business List”. It will save you plenty of chasing the information around and help you to make an informed decision.
