Who is Your Target Market? Tips to Locate Your Perfect Customer

By Alice Seba

Not knowing the type of person that would be interested in your product or services can drastically reduce your chances of succeeding. If you do not understand or know the person, how can you sell to them?

Here's news for you, that's going to be one difficult task until you have researched as to who exactly your target market is, and what it is they need. Okay, so what steps they take to discover the type of person who will readily buy what you have to offer? You'll have to continue reading to discover tips that will help you grow your online empire by simply getting to know your customer.

Talk With Your Old Customers

As a first step, if you have previous paying customers, find out what it is that makes them tick. Learn exactly what it is that they need from you. Many methods exist to do this. Here's a couple of tried and tested techniques:

Design a survey and request their ideas or opinions on your previous products or services they purchased.

Another idea is to communicate with your mailing list on a personal note, and simply ask them what it is they would like to see more of when you e-mail them.

You Can Still Research Even if You Don't Have Any CustomersYET.

Once You've Came Up With Some Ideas, Evaluate Them

When your list is complete, evaluate it. Let's say for instance you sold beauty products that reduced wrinkles and made your customer look younger. Your target market would probably be women in their 40s or older. By listing even more benefits you can go even more specific with your market and really zone in on the perfect customer for your beauty products. You might even realize you can have more than one target market and that's ok, especially since you are doing business online. This makes advertising and creating more than one site for each of your markets easy and inexpensive.

Finding Out What's Already Out There

Keyword research is also a popular method for discovering your market. There are also many other ways of market research, including reading magazines related to your niche, visiting forums, discussion groups and social network websites. Find other popular websites to uncover what the hot sellers are at the current time. Visiting your competitors web page can also give you a boost of information.

No matter how you come up with your target market, remember to take the time to put yourself in your potential customer's shoes. Whether you're just starting out with a new product or are making changes to your existing service, don't be afraid to talk to people out there to find out just exactly who the target market for your online business really is.

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