Defining your target market is one of the most important steps of your branding campaign. Some business owners actually make the mistake of skipping the customer targeting phase altogether. As the saying goes, when you are holding a hammer the whole world can begin to look like a nail: it may appear that anyone and everyone could be potential buyer for their product or service.

However, smart business owners and marketers launching a new product or service quickly set about profiling their target customer market into segments. Unless you are planning on selling bottled water to the inhabitants of a desert island, it will almost never be the case that your target market is 'everyone.'

Here is a brief overview of the main steps involved in defining your target market.

1. Start with just one of your products or services: One mistake that some companies make when carrying out customer targeting is that they try to do it for more than one of their products or services at once. However, each brand your company seeks to build requires a unique customer target profile. I suggest starting by selecting your flagship product or service.

2. Write down your initial target customer list: Chances are that when you designed your product or service you already had a general idea of who your potential customers would be. Write out that initial list. Your list can be simple, such as "businesspeople," "college students," and "rugby players."

3. Outline their characteristics: Now, look at your initial list of target customers and write down the characteristics of each one that made you want to target them in the first place. For example, you might write "uses photocopiers frequently" and "like to drink beer fairly often."

4. Refine the target customer list: Next, take a good look at your list of primary customer characteristics and see if you can collapse any of those target customer groups into fewer groups, thereby eliminating some redundant groups. The goal here is to try to cluster customers together who may have similar characteristics and therefore not really represent multiple, distinct groups. For example, it may be that what is significant to your sales efforts about college students and rugby players is that you believe they tend to enjoy drinking beer often. Therefore, you might collapse these two groups into a single group called "frequent beer drinkers." Note that during this stage, you might also choose to add some target customer groups that were not on your initial list.

5. Refine your segments and fully describe them: Now that you are looking at your final list of target customer segments, it is time to fully describe each one. To do this, you must first identify the key dimensions that are important to your segment list, such as income, geographical location, level of comfort with high technology, age, etc. These are the categories you will use to describe your target customers. Then, fully describe each of your customer segments in terms of these dimensions. Whether you have 1 or 10 segments, each should have a complete description, or profile.

Now that you have completed your customer segment profiles, you have successfully defined your target market. You can now leverage these various profiles in selecting variations on your messaging, advertising channels, and other key elements of your branding campaign.

About the Author

You can download my free eBook on how to build a winning brand at: http://www.jedcjones.com/brandmybusiness/