Target your Niche: Essential first step in creating a marketing strategy

The first step in creating a marketing strategy is to identify your niche or target market.

This will provide the foundation you need to develop your marketing strategy. When you zero in on your target customer, you’ll find it MUCH easier to create marketing messages that "connect" with your customers. 

Many businesses find identifying a niche market difficult.  The owner will look at his client or customer list and say, "THEY HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON!  They’re young… they’re old and they’re everything in between!  I have women, I have men and I have children as customers!  I have married people, single people and divorced people as customers!  How can I find some demographic that all of my customers have in common?"

If this is your battle cry, you are not alone!

First, let’s "reframe" how you think of targeting your customers.  For example, one client of mine came to me a year ago with just such a lament.  Media rep after media rep had hammered the point that targeting his niche market meant identifying the age, gender and income of his ideal client. However, when we began to look BEYOND the surface, we found one interesting thing ALL of his clients had in common:  They were all relatively affluent and they were all interested in healthy living.   In the end, his clients were interested in health foods, natural and whole foods AND exercise. 

Suddenly, everything came into focus.   His television commercial is now running on Food Network and we’re creating POS pieces to place in local gyms and health food stores.   All because we looked BEYOND the simple demographics and dug deeper.  In the "marketing biz" it’s known as "behavioral targeting"…. when a group of demographically diverse people are targeted based on behavior instead of age/income/gender. 

Many business owners find identifying a niche market difficult and  that is why I wrote Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.  In the book, I help to simplify the process of defining your target or niche market.