Let's say that your primary market is local or regional, and that you live in a community with a population of 50,000 people. The first thing you'll need to do is research the 'demographics' of your community, and divide it into market segments:

• Age: children, teens, young, middle, elderly
• Gender: male, female
• Education: high school, college, university
• Income: low, medium, high
• Marital status: single, married, divorced
• Ethnic and/or religious background
• Household composition: newly married, with or without children.

Next, you need to segment the market as much as possible using 'psychographics' as your guide:

• Lifestyle: conservative, exciting, trendy, economical
• Social class: lower, middle, upper
• Opinion: easily led or opinionated
• Activities and interests: sports, physical fitness, shopping, books
• Attitudes and beliefs: environmentalist, security conscious.

*Note: if you are a B2B company, you'll also need to consider the types of industries available to you, and their number of employees, annual sales volume, location, and company stability. In addition, you might want to find out how they purchase: seasonally, locally, only in volume, who makes the decisions? It is important to note that businesses, unlike individuals, buy products or services for three reasons only: to increase revenue, to maintain the status quo, or to decrease expenses. If you fill one or more of these corporate needs, you may have found a target market.

By now you should have a picture emerging of who you think your 'ideal' customer is … or who you want it to be. Depending on the nature of your business, you might even be able to write a description of your customer. "My target customer is a middle-class woman in her 30s or 40s who is married and has children, and is environmentally conscious and physically fit." Based on these findings you uncovered, above, Geoscape can make a count, for example, that there are approximately 19,000 of those potential customers in your area! It may well be that 6000 of them are already loyal to a competitor, but that still leaves 13,000 who are not, or who have not yet purchased the product from anyone. 

Lots of times prospective customers don't know about your company, or can't tell the difference between your company and others. It is your job, once you know who your best customers are, to 'target' the group that you've identified – even if you have competition.

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Questions about how Geoscape's reseach and analysis can help your business grow?

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