Deciding on Your Target Market

One of the best ways to make your business get a good foundation is to ensure that you have a target market. You have to niche in some way. Otherwise, you're going to wind up trying to please everyone, and you will fade back into the cacophony of other eCommerce businesses fighting for consumers' attention.
Determining your target market can be a scary thing. You have a lot of things that you need to consider. Here are some of the questions that you should ask yourself when you are trying to decide.

Who Would Pay for This Service or Product?
The first question to answer is who is likely to pay for your service or product. In some cases, this may be distinct from the group that you want to use your product or service. For instance, toddler educational toys are intended for toddlers but they are marked toward parents because parents are the ones who have the purchasing power. Ideally though you should make this category as narrow as possible without making it too constricting. You can look at your location. For instance, if you decide on incorporation Canada, then you would do well to target sub groups in the Canadian demographic.

Who Has Already Made Purchases?
If you have already been in business for a bit, you can look over your past sales to see who is buying from you the most. Try to get into as many details as possible at this point. Look at the age group. Look at the ethnicity. Look at the gender. Look at the occupation. All of these things will help to paint a fuller image of who you are most likely to succeed with. Remember that just one client does not make it likely that that is your target audience. Look for repeats and correlations. You may want to keep notes for a couple of months if you can't remember clearly.

Do You Have Pie Eyes?
When looking at a target market, it's not at all uncommon for business owners to assume that they can take on more than they really can. When targeting your ideal customer base, this results in appealing to too broad an audience. The result is that you cannot please your customers nor can you successfully distinguish yourself. Make sure that the audience that you target is one whose needs you can meet. Analyze yourself objectively and with great scrutiny. You may need to get additional input from someone you trust and who knows about business. It's never easy to hear that you're looking at too broad a market, but you will do significantly better if you keep your audience at a size you can handle.

What Could Be Done to Make This Product More Appealing to the Previous Markets?
If you have a good start already, then look at that target market and ask what you would need to do to better satisfy those customers' needs. Most of the time, there are things you could be doing to better serve your customers. Make sure that you consider what those measures would take and how effective they would be. If it won't take too much to make your product better serve that demographic, then there's a good chance that you've found your target market.

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