When marketing your product or service, you want to identify the people who are most likely to buy your product or service. Not all bald men buy toupees. Not all thirsty women buy Diet Coke. You want to find out what the qualities are about the individuals in your target market that make it more likely they’ll buy what you’re selling.
I’ve seen a number of discussions about target market profiles that urge marketers to “blue sky” these qualities – to make them up. I don’t agree with that. Whatever you’re selling is not unique, believe me. That may hurt your pride, but someone somewhere has tried to sell something similar. If you can find a group of people who bought that, then interview them about what they liked and didn’t like about that service or product. And learn as much about their demographics and psychographics as possible. You’ll find all the individuals have different traits, but the most enthusiastic purchasers have similar characteristics.
Demographics are the data points that help define a group of people, like age range, employment, where they live, hair color – physical things you can catalog and categorize the group by.
Psychographics is how people think and feel about given issues, their attitudes and aspirations.
You want to build a profile by interviewing members of your target market. If you’ve got ideal customers already, find out everything you can about them. You want to take as much information as you can, and look for similarities. Maybe you find that 67% of your best customers like Italian food. That by itself may not mean much, but if you invited prospects to a sales presentation at the best Italian restaurant, you could guess that two thirds of your prospects would think better of you for serving them their favorite food.
You want to look for similarities in your “best” customers (however you define “best”), and similarities in your “worst” clients. You’ll be able to guess with reasonable certainty which people to pursue to become your customers. You’ll save money by not trying to market to people who are unlikely to want your product or service, and you’ll make more money per sale because you’ll know what add-ons your ideal customers will want to buy in addition to your main items.