It all started innocently enough.  I was chatting up some students in a business planning class I teach about marketing.  The importance of marketing, how to market and the like. The basic premise was to make sure you market your business since people need to know you exist before they will become your customers.

 

Then we moved into the gritty guts of defining a target market.  I was telling them that you want to define a target market because that is the market you will pay to advertise to.  This saves time, energy and money that would otherwise be wasted on shouting to people that have no intention of using you.

 

This is the point when the class shifted in their seats and challenged me from what seemed like an ethical point of view.  I didn’t do any favors to my preaching when I exclaimed that stereotypes save time. It was getting late and we had a bit more ground to cover so we glossed over the challenge and moved on.

 

But the ride home I kept circling around the target market discussion in my head.  Clearly I failed to illustrate that having a target market does not make you racist, ageist, sexist or any other ist.  Not serving or selling to people based on their race, age, sex, etc. definitely would and is not what I am advising at all.  The differentiation is where I believe the misunderstanding came from.

 

Most businesses have a target market, whether they realize it or not.  Most target markets that I work define with my clients don’t bring up race.  But age, sex, financial status and all manner of other details certainly come into play.  Does your target market have kids, where do they live, what do they drive, how often do they cut their hair, what do they eat for breakfast, are they married?  These questions, if relevant to the product or service, are useful.

 

From these details you can come up with your target market.  For example, if I am starting a hair salon business, I will not be targeting bald men.  Unless it is almost Valentine’s Day or I know these bald men have a wedding anniversary coming up soon.  Then I am only catering to bald men that are married.

 

The point is that just because you target, or exclude, a certain demographic does not mean you dislike that demographic.  You just are not spending money and time to convince them to come to your store or buy from you. Likely because they have no need or desire to buy from you even if you did target them.

 

The other challenge may have come from the word “demographic”.  In most basic definitions people read the word “demographic” to be defined and limited to race, sex and age. In the case of a marketing demographic, it goes much deeper than that.  It gets into hobbies, food choices, credit scores and crazy details like average number of sodas consumed per year.

 

So what do you do?  Pick out your target demographic by deciding who needs or wants your product or service and target your advertising to them.  Then sell to anyone that shows interest, regardless of whether they saw your targeted ads or not.

 

Or skip all marketing and wonder why no customers are showing up.

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James Kademan is a Business Coach for Draw In Customers Business Coaching in Madison, Wisconsin as well as the author of The BOLD Business Book. When he isn’t making his students squirm from reality, he is busy guiding entrepreneurs to success in business and beyond. He blogs successfully to the world at www.drawincustomers.com. If you are considering hiring a business coach, take a moment to call James at (608)210-2221. Target the people you want to know about you, again and again and again…

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