How to Determine Your Ideal Market

"If you market and sell to everyone, you market and sell to no one." Most of us have heard that maxim before, but how many of us have taken its message seriously? The most direct line to growing our businesses is one that runs straight to our ideal customer and client, or target market. To identify and find that market, we must first identify who our ideal customers and clients are, what their wants and needs are, how do we meet those wants and needs, and where do we find those businesses.

However, before we can answer any of those questions, we must first know ourselves, because at the end of the day, clients and customers will hire us or purchase from us because of who we are, not because of what we sell. And once we understand ourselves well, we can then proceed to identifying our target market.

Here are a few recommendations you might choose to follow to begin the process to understand who you are and whoat the customers and clients that are the perfect fit for matching your business to their wants and needs look like.

• What is your mission? For example, Starbucks doesn't sell coffee, they provide the Third Place Experience. Missions should be about serving wants and needs with solutions, not products and services. The Starbucks solution fits those customers who need a place to get away from home and work.
• What is your passion? You have two choices when it comes to what your business will become. You can either determine yourself how your business grows, what your business becomes and who your business will serve or you can let others decide for you. If you only serve those who call you, then you give up control of your business and its culture to your purchasers. But if you understand your passion and why you started or why you work in a particular profession or business, then you can reach out to those you want to work with and make every day a better day for you and your customer, because you both are passionate about the same things.
• What are your values? The biggest step you can take to identifying your ideal customers and clients is to understand the values that form the foundation of your business and then reach out to those businesses that hold the same or similar values. By doing so, you and your customers will be trying to achieve the same end results instead of trying to achieve results that you might or might not believe in--a very difficult task to say the least.
• What wants and needs do your solutions fulfill? When you sell solutions, your purpose is different than when you sell widgets. Solutions require you to understand your customer's wants and needs, their customer's wants and needs, and how your products ands services fulfill those wants and needs. By taking that path to marketing and sales, you spend more time learning about your customers and clients and helping them meet their wants and needs. This is relationship building and by understanding who needs your solutions, you are ready to build a loyal customer base instead of creating one-up sales and having always to seek new customers.

Once you achieve these first steps, you are now ready to ask those important questions:

• Who are our ideal customers and clients, what do they look like and why are they our ideal target audience?

• What are their wants and needs?

• How do we meet those wants and needs with our solutions?

• Where do we find those businesses and how do we reach out to them?