Taking time to determine the customers that are best fit for your product or service can be time well spent. By Phillip Beatty #000312
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Target Market
By Philip Beatty
Hello, I’m Philip Beatty and I’m representing inspiring better business today. What I want to talk to you about is a process that can help you improve the profit of your company. It has to do with a most strategic element of your marketing strategy and that is clearly defining your target market. That is who are the businesses or who are the families and the individuals that would benefit the most from your product and services. You can meet their delivery requirements.
Here are three questions that can help you find the people or businesses that want and can afford your products or services:
- Who are they? What type of business are they in for example or are they just households? For example the type of business, are they a grocery store or are they a restaurant? That if you are a farmer and are producing farm products how many businesses are family in your delivery area that meet your target requirements?
- And then you need to know where these best customers are. You need to know where they are. Are they within a 5-mile radius? Are they within your County? Are they within a bus right away or in your country or even the world?
- How do they think. What do they value? What’s important to them? Do they want high or core medium or low quality products? Is the on-time delivery important to them? What else is important to your target market?
Now one of the best ways to find the businesses or family who fit in your target market is for you to review your customer list and identify your very best customers. Then look for customers that are like or even better by make better customers for you. Look at your competitors. The point is you need to look at your competitors too and you may be able to identify competitors that you can compete with and match or produce better products than they are. The reason you want to do this is to improve sales so that your revenue goes up and your potential profit. Is something that you can depend on month after month after month.
Now my experience as a consultant, a performance business consultant I was working with an engineering firm and he approached us at a time when he thought the oil business market would improve, and so he was able to reorganize his business from Strictly time and materials. That is they would take on jobs, they would say this will take ten hours or a hundred hours and they only got paid so bad of rate for those hundred hours. But what he was able to do was to set up so he could handle big projects that had to be managed as projects. And those had the possibility of having a much higher profit margin. What happened at the end of his first year when he came to us, he said I need help, what I’d like to do is I think I can double my revenue in the coming year. And, we said well let us see what we can do and we came up with a plan and in the year that he had just finished he had made 2.6 million dollars of gross revenue. At the end of the next year with our help he was able to identify a completely different target market. That he was able to get the business he needed, and was actually able to increase his revenue the next year to nine point six million dollars. So, it’s important to make sure that you’re selling your services to the right people, at the right price where you can develop a profit machine that you can count on month after month.
Let me give you another example of how target market being very deliberate about who you’re trying to find as customers. I have a friend who’s been in the moving business. And in his business one of the ways he was able to get business was he would go to storage facilities and those people always have people who are going to want to have things that they have to move there to store them but for whatever reason. So, they would often ask the storage facility manager who they could use to help them move their belongings that they wanted to put there. And that got them business. Another way he was able to use a target market idea was to think about the people who have contact with the people who needed his moving services. Another one was to go to retirement centers. These are facilities where people when they no longer able to take care of a large home that they have and they’re getting older, and they need to have meals provided for them, they need to be where they can receive the amount of care they need as they age. Those people are always looking for someone to help them move new tenants into their facility and that was another way he did that.
Another agency that really worked well for them is they made friends with and demonstrated to realtor’s who knew people that were selling a house and they would need to move all of their belongs out of the house they’re selling. And move them either out of town or even across town. What he would do would be to invite realtors. One of the things that realtor’s do is they take all their realtor some time during the week on a tour of all the houses they have listed so that all of the realtors are aware of what they can do. And they would have them in their tour at their facility and they would serve them lunch and promised them that they could be eating within two minutes after they got there and they could leave within 15 minutes if they wanted to. This gave them an opportunity to show them they’re moving facility, their trucks, their storage areas and all of those kinds of things. And this got them a lot of business. So thinking about people who also know your people that are your target markets it adds a whole other dimension to the idea of target market.
