As much as you would love to sell to everyone, you need to accept that everyone is not your customer. No matter what you sell, there are people who will want your product and others who won’t. As a small  business owner, you need to focus precious marketing resources on connecting with people who might really want to buy.

There are several ways to look at your target market:

• Separate potential customers by demographic characteristics.
  • Age, income, gender, marital status for consumers.
  • Company sales, number of employees, years in business or industry served for business-to-business.
• Psychographics, values,  lifestyle and critical events
  • What is important to a consumer? Religion, national origin, home, family and job may all influence purchasing decisions? The birth of a child, a new job or a new home are all trigger events which set off a rash of purchases.
  • Purchases in businesses may be impacted by industry trends, new regulations, launches of new products, mergers, acquisitions or  in response to competitive activity.

You can’t just stop when you identify a segment. The next challenge is deciding if the segment is large enough to support your business. Want to learn more? Listen to the entire program or look for more content on  niche marketing on our blog.