How to Find Your Target
To find your brand’s target market, it’s important to first identify whether your business is business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B).
Your company is business-to-consumer if you’re selling directly to people. Examples of B2C companies are clothing stores, essential oil companies, coffee shops, and other businesses where you’re targeting people who need your services or products — not other businesses.
Your company is business-to-business if your products and services are primarily serving other businesses. For example if you’re a commercial realtor, or you develop software for companies, or any other situation where you’re selling to businesses and not individuals, then your company is B2B.
Whether your business is B2C or B2B, our free branding workbook will help you clarify your health & wellness brand using a few simple exercises. You can download your copy here:
Business to Consumer
To find your target as a B2C company, start by determining your customer’s demographic. Consider your ideal customer’s:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Occupation
- Education
- Income
- Marital status
- Children
Knowing these details of your ideal customer will help you picture who that person is. You will know what they’re exposed to, what their day-to-day life looks like, what is important to them, and where exactly they hang out online or offline.
After determining your customer’s demographic, you can focus on identifying your customer’s psychographic. This includes thinking about their:
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Activities
- Attitudes
- Beliefs
Knowing these aspects of your customer will help you picture what that person does. You can imagine their day and what they do in that day. You can know if they go out for lunch or drinks, and what restaurants they frequent. You can picture if they like yoga, if they shop in a local store for leggings, etc.
It’s important to understand the personality of your target persona so you can speak directly to them. You need to know as much as you can about your target, and then focus on two or three aspects of what you listed above.
If someone has six hobbies, you don’t need to tailor your branding to address all six — but you can choose one or two aspects of a person’s demographic and psychographic and use those to attract them.
Business to Business
B2B customers are harder to define because you need to know which businesses could benefit from your services or products. Think about the following characteristics those ideal businesses would have:
- Business size (number of employees)
- Who the decision makers are in the company
- How to get in front of those decision makers
First you need to define the audience, but in this case you aren’t reaching out to individual people but to businesses. Yes, people work for those businesses and you will talk to a real person, but you need to start by knowing more about the business or company itself.
From there, you can dig deeper into the people you will work with in those companies — what job titles do they have? How many people do they report to? Can those people make spending decisions on their own?
Would you prefer to work with businesses that have two, or five, or fifty employees? The size of the companies you work with will determine their structure and who you will need to speak to in order to sell your services or product.
If a company has two employees, you’re most likely going to talk directly with the owner, but if you want to work with a company like Walmart you’re definitely not going to meet the owner. In that case, you would likely meet with a manager or someone from their marketing or business department who can present the idea to someone else above them.
After you figure out your target company’s size and who the decision makers are, you can make a plan on how to reach out to them. You could find those people on LinkedIn and message them, go into their office and drop off flyers, meet them at networking events, find their phone number, or come up with other creative ways to contact them.
For more ideas on ways to reach your target, you can take our brand personality quiz! Your quiz results include quick and simple way to connect with your target customers:
How did you find your target market? If you have any creative ways to find your ideal client that we didn’t mention, feel free to comment below or shoot us an email at [email protected].
And if you’re seeking help with digging into the demographic and psychographics of your customers, drop us a line. We live and breathe brand strategy every day, and we would love to help scale your business through powerful branding.