Planning Weeks 1-2

Describe Your Target Customers

To find your ideal customer, you need to be able to describe them

“Target customer” is MBA-speak for the description of your ideal group of customers.

The name evokes the image of hitting the bulls-eye during a game of darts.

This topic is one important area of business know-how where you start with certain knowledge, and gain much more as you sell and evaluate your selling.

In this decision, we guide you to write down what you know now about your target customer, possibly including:

1. If consumers – age, gender, income, location, lifestyle, etc.
2. If businesses – company line of business, employee size, evidence their buy your business category.

How To Do It

1. As we said in the introduction to this task, your existing knowledge and experience in working with your product or service is critically important in writing an intelligent narrative for this part of your marketing plan.

Once again, you may wish to use a blank piece of paper or a new Word file to write or type in short passages of text that describe what you know about your target customer.

Two examples:
#1 – Home maintenance service for homeowners.
– Does the neighborhood tell you something?
– is the age of the house significant?
– Does the exterior material of the house matter?

#2 – Small business accounting services.
– Does the number of employees tell you something?
– Does having a certain kind of accounting software installed indicate more readiness to buy?

2. Go to your Marketing Plan Summary document and scroll down to the section entitled: “Target Market”.

3. Type in numbers and other answers to each section as best as you can at this point in time.