How To Target Your Market

Stop!

If you even the slightest thought of selling anything online,
you must be able to answer one question before you do
anything...

Who wants to buy your product or service?

If you're going to sell, there has to be a market that will
buy, it's an irrefutable law of business and it applies to
online businesses as well.

"Catering to a niche" or "specializing" or "targeting a
market," whatever you call it, it's the key to a small
business succeeding on the Internet.

Let Amazon or Ebay sell everything to everyone. Small online
businesses target a few select markets and give those markets
the special attention that only small businesses can give.

Find Your Markets

First, you should just ask yourself the question I posed
earlier, "Who wants to buy my product or service?"

Most small businesses know their market well; they just have
to think about it for a second.

For example, let's take web design. We start by making of
list of anyone that might need web design:

* Individuals
* Churches
* Schools
* Small Businesses
* Large Businesses
* Etc.

Target Your Markets

When you look at that small list, you start to realize that
each market has it's own needs, budget, and reason for
needing web design.

For example, imagine the difference between web design for
large corporate businesses and web design for schools.

Large businesses will probably be looking for an ecommerce
solution and they have the budget to afford a team of
designers. You would need to target them with this in mind.

Schools on the other hand, do not need ecommerce. They are
looking for a way to inform the community about what is
happening at their school. They might also want to
incorporate a webmail system for the students and faculty.
Overall, large businesses will need a more professional
approach than schools.

The point is, each market deserves special attention. You
can't compromise between your markets. Instead you must
target each market individually.

What Does My Market Need?

Let's say we decided on small businesses as one of our key
markets. How do we know what they need?

You can start with some common sense. Small businesses are
going to be price conscious, but expect quality. You will
most likely be dealing with the owner or someone close to the
owner. You basically just want to think about who your
customer really is.

An optional next step is to actually ask. Find some people
who represent your target market and just ask them what is
important to them.

Just imagine a visitor arriving at your web site and
instantly knowing that you can help him. If you have
correctly targeted the right markets, your visitors will feel
like you are in tune with their needs.