How to Effectively Target Your Most Profitable Customers.

If you have that great and highly differentiated idea, then targeting your customers should your next step.

This exercise will also reveal if there is actually a market for your brainchild, whether a radically new gadget, originally themed book, or extraordinarily novel service.

However - and this is important to note - this is where many inventors/authors/marketers fail!

To be sure, attempting to be ‘all things to all people’ by marketing your product to all-and-sundry will lead to a diffused, and an often confused marketing campaign.

Instead, go out and discover the specific Demographic and Psychographic factors of your biggest market. Then market to that audience more than any other and as often as possible.

Demographics are the basic attributes and quantitative characteristics of your market: including the customer sector’s age, gender, profession, culture, employment, industry, income level, marital status, location, and so on.

Psychographics are made up of the emotional and behavioural qualities of your market: including the customer sector’s emotions, reasoning, history, psychology, and thought processes behind their decision to buy your product.

A demographic example might be the number of Workman between age 25 and 55 working in the City area runs to a population of 2,500. A survey shows that 40% of this group might buy a new pair of Work Boots every 9 months.

A psychographic example might be a young girl about town, choosing a new pair of shoes not because she necessarily needs them, but because she wants to look fashionable or sexy or/and in the crowd.

To gather the demographic numbers and psychographic priorities, conduct a survey, which is split into 2 sets of demographic and psychographic questions.

Demographic questions:

Who are your customers?
How many customers are there?
How many customer groups by gender, spending, profession, etc?
Where are each group?
What is the total value of each group?
What is the total volume of each group?
What is the largest customer group by value and volume?
How often do they purchase?
Where do they purchase your product?
Why would (or otherwise) your customers chose to buy yours over the competition?
Why would they buy from you at that specific point in time?

Psychographic questions:

What are your customers motives to buy?
Why do they need or want your product?
In fact, do they need or want your product at all?
What characteristics would they need or want in the product?
What, thus, characteristics need to designed into your product?
Why would your customers buy right away (on impulse) or take their time?
If they shopped around, why would they?
Where would they go and what can you learn?
What do they like the most and the least about the product?
Would they refer your product to others?
If not, why not?

My book Hyperinnovation (see near top side bar) goes into all this much further in part 5 of the book, with a systematic end-to-end methodology.