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How to Determine Your B2B Target Market

Having a clear understanding of who your target market is will help you produce more effective products and provide better services. Targeting a specific business type or industry reduces the money you waste on trying to reach a general broad audience. A general audience has too many personalities to which to appeal with a single message. Targeting can identity features that should be added to products and features that are useless. Targeting also helps you with things like expanding into new locations and uncovering how your company can be more competitive in the market.

Things You'll Need

  • Survey questionnaire
  • Telephone
  • Industry reports
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Instructions

    • 1

      Survey your current customers. Print a list of questions and send them to your customers. Let them know you are in the process of providing better, more targeted services to them.

    • 2

      Gather information about why they make the buying decisions they make. According to AllBusiness.com, "Primary research involves collecting original data about the preferences, buying habits, opinions, and attitudes of current or prospective customers." Commission a full market research study by getting your employees and partners involved in making phone calls to vendors, competitors, customers and prospects to dig for information.

    • 3

      Identify the ways customers can use your product. First, list the features of the product. Then next to each feature note what type of company or executive finds that feature useful. Third, list the benefits of using the product. Next to each feature list the type of company that could enjoy this benefit.

    • 4

      List the industries that are prime targets for your product based on the types of companies you have listed next to your benefits and features list.

    • 5

      Determine the annual sales level or company size of the types of companies who buy similar products. Publicly traded companies post this information under the investor's link on their websites. For private companies, estimate annual sales figures by averaging numbers from industry sales studies, vendor interviews or any information the company is willing to give you.

    • 6

      Pinpoint your target market location on a map. If you operate on a global scale, pinpoint the top three countries your target market originates from. Consider ways climate might impact the buying habits of your customer's customers, therefore impacting your sales to your potential customers.

    • 7

      Determine the purchase frequency of your potential customers such as seasonally, weekly, monthly or annually in extremely large volumes. In the book The Complete Book of Business Plans, Joseph Covello and Brian Hazelgren write (p. 102), "You will need to determine if they are currently buying or plan to buy what you are selling, and most important, you must determine how much they currently buy and how much they plan to spend."

    • 8

      Examine the executives who make buying decisions for the businesses that buy products like yours. If possible, research their past positions and what policies and procedures they implemented in companies for which they worked previously.

    • 9

      Create three profiles for your most important customer types at each level: small business, medium-sized business and large corporations. Break down each level into average revenue, company size, buying habits, future outlook and what is important to meeting the company's growth plans.

    • 10

      Submit the report to your product development team. Discuss ways to improve products to appeal more to these three companies. Michael Mancini, Vice President of Data Product Management at Nielsen Claritas, said, "Use data on existing business customers to score profit potential, prioritize acquisition, retention and cross-selling initiatives."

    • 11

      Adjust your approach in your marketing material. Review all previously printed material, websites, business cards, etc., and ask yourself if content would appeal to your profile companies.

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