Who is your target market?

The very first thing you must start with when you’re doing lead generation marketing is you have to know who your customer is. The first items to address when trying to launch a successful campaign are all about the “who.” Who’s the customer? Who are we talking to? Who is the audience and who are you trying to attract? Because everything revolves around that.

Your target market is a group of customers with shared demographics and psychographics who have been identified as the most likely buyers of your products or services.

Demographics are things like city size, number of users, types of equipment they’re using, number of years in business, etc. Psychographics is a little more of an advanced topic. These are the things that you can think of how birds of a feather, flock together.

Your business can have more than one business or client profile.

These are called segments. For example, a doctor at a small medical practice is going to have different needs, budgets, concerns and buying criteria for outsourced IT services than most all other businesses. You want to talk to a doctor’s office a little bit differently than you would talk to a manufacturing firm or real estate firm.

Your target market is your generic group of customers. Then you might have sections of your target markets and lists that can also be segmented by behavior. They can be segmented by source years in business. (If you THINK you’re ahead of the game and really know your target market, check this out.) 

This is an example of a target market that will help you begin the lead generation process:

You could begin by saying you want all privately owned businesses that are also located within a 30 mile drive of Franklin, (or wherever you are of course), have at least ten or more employees that use a laptop and outsource some or all of their IT support. That is an example of a target market.

Now, you can segment that. You can tighten that up. You could say you want everybody (who’s that)? And they must be a dental practice. You could also say I want everyone who’s all “this” and they have to be “this”. Furthermore, you might narrow that down or even expand it out depending on how big of a TAM (total addressable market) you want to target.

There are target markets, then you can segment the target market, and then you can segment each segmented area of your target market. You may even decide to suppress certain segments. It may be your target market, but you decide you are just going to target certain industries. That would be an example of segments of that target market. You might say they are the core target customer, or these are ones that you want to take out.

To be able to segment your market, you need a powerful CRM.  To see a demo of ours, specifically tailored to MSPs, Click Here

How MSPs Can Set Up Autopilot Marketing Systems

I’ll leave you with a thought on customers and how you decide who you will target.

Dr. Nido Qubein coined one of my favorite quotes and that is “Who your customer is today is a piece of data, and who your customer should be is a piece of strategy.”

You don’t have to accept whoever you’ve got. You can invite different people to the party if you don’t like them. That’s how you define your target market, and properly begin lead generation.

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