How to Find Your Target Market

Identifying potential customers for your business, product or service can be difficult as people are constantly changing, but if you know your target audience you can better learn how to market to them. Follow the steps to learn how to build a customer profile by finding your target market.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Research Demographics

1. Look at the age and gender of the people who use your product. You can do this by surveying the consumers or deciding what age and gender you want to attract to your product.
2. Find out your consumers' education and income levels. You may be able to market differently to those who have earned a college degree versus those who haven't and to those who are in a high income bracket versus those who aren't.
3. Notice the marital status and family life cycle of your target consumers. Find out whether they are single, newlyweds, have been married for many years, or have children or grandchildren. Each type spends money differently.
4. Look at the ethnic and religious background of the people who use your product. This may not make a difference in many cases, and is often good to know.
5. Put all the demographic information into a customer demographic profile. For example, you may find that your target market includes people in their 30s and 40s who graduated from high school, have a middle class income and are married with young children.

Research Psychographics

6. Look at the target consumers' lifestyle. See whether they are conservative, trendy, enjoy traveling or drive a minivan. Every little detail can tell you the type of people they are.
7. Figure out what social class your consumers belong to, whether lower, middle or upper class. This tells you how much extra money they may have to spend and whether or not they spend it.
8. See whether your consumers are opinion leaders or followers. Find out whether they tell others what products they should use or need others to tell them what is trendy and what works.
9. Look at their activities, interests, attitudes and beliefs. Find out what they like to do in their spare time, what their hobbies are, what sort of music they listen to and whether they are interested in environmental issues or politics.
10. Put the psychographic information into a customer profile along with the demographic information to figure out who your market is and how to go about advertising to the market. Once you find this out, you can advertise to the people where they hang out, where they work out or where they shop.