Defining your target market is one of the most critical choices you make for your business. Who is your customer?
Deciding the audience for your product and brand gives you the building blocks in order to create your business strategy. It will give you the solid ground on how you can decide on which path your product and brand will be. Clearly identifying your customers will take your business to the next level.
Who Is Your Customer?
Your customers should be the center for every marketing decision in your business.
Buyers, consumers, influencers, distributors, and the list goes on depending on how you see and define your brand. These are your possible customers but businesses are making a mistake when they give these divisions an equal or greater priority than what the primary customer should be getting. This leads to channeling energy, resources and time in the wrong places and hindering a brand’s potential to create value and grow.
The key to success is knowing who your primary customer is and the ranking to follow to optimize value creation and profit.
When choosing who your primary customer is, the focus should always be on the people using the product. They are the ones for whom value is being created and the reason why the market and the product exists.
Marketing Comes After Positioning
Now that you know who your customer is, your next step should be to define your brand’s value or positioning.
Brand positioning is the conceptual place in your target consumer’s mind that you want to own. It’s the attributes or benefits you want them to think when they think of your brand.
By shaping customer predilection, brand positioning strategies and tactics are connected to consumer loyalty and the willingness to purchase. Effective brand positioning can be defined as the extent to which a brand is recognized as favorable, different and credible in consumers’ minds, this is where marketing takes off.
Marketing refers to the tools you utilize to deliver the message of your brand. One of the best marketing tool out there is by having your own online office – your website. Websites are the most effective marketing tool to shape your customers’ minds in becoming familiar with your brand. Because of audience reach and impressions, websites tell the world who you are, what you do, where to find you and why they should choose to work with you.
Who Does Your Brand Serve?
Pick your customer. Your brand cannot accommodate all things to all people. Even Apple with it’s vast cash reserves cannot be all things to all customers. You have to choose.
Defining who your customer is the foundation of your brand. Ask yourself the these questions:
- You are …
- You do …
- You serve …
Your brand instantly becomes more extraordinary and interesting when it’s centered on a well defined target market.