Last week’s post offered five suggestions to help you better select your target audience. We looked at the consequences of failing to define characteristics that match your target market to your offer. Here are some additional criteria to help you better define your target market in a B2B setting.
How to Use Standard Criteria to Define Your Target Market
Consider long-standing, well established criteria to determine your target market:
Company revenue – What is the revenue of the company that would find value in your product or service? Look at your customer base. What is the company revenue of your customers? This will be a good indicator, assuming you plan to offer the same product or service at the same price point. For example, a company offering a solution typically at a $250,000 entry point would not target companies grossing $1M or less. However, that same company could re-package their product or service and offer this solution at a monthly subscription entry price of $200. Now, it is feasible that a $1M company could be a target market for this same company.
Number of employees– You may find number of employees helps to define your target market. Look at your customer base as a benchmark. Determine the average number of employees your customers employ. There is a correlation between company size and number of employees. For example, if is unlikely that a $100M revenue company employs 10 people as it is also likely that a $1M revenue company employs 1,000 people.
Verticals- You may want to target industries where your company has proven success. For example, say your product or service has helped financial companies. You have a list of successful customers in that industry. This may be a good vertical to target. Conversely, you have done very well with many financial services companies. So you may want to branch out into similar industries that may find what they need with the same solution.
Geography – This may provide other criteria to better refine your target market. If using your product or service requires little to no training, you may want to widen your geographic reach. Your product or service may be complex and require labor and capital to implement. If so, you may want to limit your geography close to your resources that can support your offering for your customer.
I hope these common sense tips help you better narrow your target market.