{"id":10126,"date":"2020-07-17T12:18:43","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T16:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jumpstartinc.org\/?p=10126"},"modified":"2025-02-19T16:43:21","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T21:43:21","slug":"who-is-your-target-customer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jumpstartinc.org\/sme\/who-is-your-target-customer","title":{"rendered":"Who Is Your Target Customer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>To whom are you selling? This is one of the most basic, albeit crucial, questions you must answer when developing your go-to-market strategy. The answer will determine your target market, a group of potential customers who you intend to be the recipients of your marketing efforts. These customers are the people or organizations that have pain points your product or service is trying to address.<\/p>\n

Below are a few strategies to help you to identify your most profitable audience:<\/p>\n

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Identify Your Target Market<\/h4>\n

Identifying your target market will likely require a deep understanding of your customer and their needs. This knowledge can be obtained by collecting data through primary and secondary market research.<\/p>\n

Primary market research is completed using surveys and speaking directly to customers\u2013tasks that are often referred to as customer discovery<\/a>. Secondary market research is accomplished by leveraging existing research that\u2019s been collected from reports and studies by government agencies, trade associations or other businesses.<\/p>\n

Finding your niche can be tough, but it is vital to your success. This video<\/a>, by Customer Development Labs, illustrates a strategy that helps narrow down a larger customer segment into a more focused target segment. In addition, Chuck Cohn\u2019s Steps To Identify Your Target Market<\/a> provides additional insight and strategies for success in this arena.<\/p>\n

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Keep it Focused! Expand On Success, Don\u2019t Contract On Failure<\/h4>\n

Early-stage companies are often ambitious and tend to make the mistake of thinking that \u201ceveryone is our customer\u201d or \u201canyone with a smartphone is our customer.\u201d This is not a great strategy considering startups are strapped for money, time and other resources. It requires a lot of these resources for a company to try to attract \u201ceverybody\u201d as their customer.<\/p>\n

Instead, young companies should seek to dominate a smaller market, then expand to a larger market rather than failing to reach a larger market and then being forced to refocus on a smaller segment.<\/p>\n

A minimum viable segment (MVS) is a market that is focused enough that your product or service can dominate by meeting the common needs of the customers in the segment. MVS methodology allows you to quickly and cheaply validate potential markets. If the assumed target customer isn\u2019t a good fit, the company will have likely saved enough marketing resources to shift marketing efforts toward a different segment.<\/p>\n

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Develop Customer Personas<\/h4>\n

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of the customers that you are trying to attract. By creating fake characters like \u201cAttorney Anthony\u201d or \u201cManager Molly,\u201d you can make it easier to see your customers as real people.<\/p>\n

For example, let\u2019s say your ideal customer is someone you name Manager Molly. A handful of the many characteristics that you could assign to her might include:<\/p>\n