Suppose Mr U, an entrepreneur, comes up with a billion-dollar startup idea for a revolutionary product.
He meets Mr A and entrepreneur who likes this idea and helps him in assembling a team of highly-skilled professionals to execute his idea and produce this divine product.
After months of hard work, the product gets ready to be consumed by the customers.
However, contrary to his expectations, Mr A finds out that his revolutionary product has made zero sales.
Mr U had a perfect idea, a perfect team, and a perfect product. Notwithstanding any of this, he failed. Why did this happen?
Although Mr U’s idea for the product was infallible, his product had no market.
Which indicates that there was no distinct demand of the buyers that his product satisfied.
A tech startup company has services to offer to a lot of wide range of consumers.
However, due to initial budgetary restraints and limited resources, a startup needs to identify the target market it will direct all the marketing and advertising towards.
The internet had a very small target market initially that solely included the military and scientists.
Even Facebook, a giant with a net worth of 671.48 billion dollars, started with targeting college students as users. Therefore, defining a Target Market is not going to limit your market.
Find out the problem that your product solves.
The first step in trying to find your target market is to find out the practical problem that your product solves, and whether or not there is a market for it. If there is a market, who is it?
What kind of people face the said problem? What kind of people would like to invest in getting a solution to that problem? A
Will your operations be B2B or B2C or both?
Answering the above question will you give you an idea of whether you would like to provide services to other businesses or directly serve the end consumers. The purpose of identifying the potential consumers of your services is to ensure that your startup’s technology and limited resources are focused in the direction of the most valuable customers.
Survey and Analyze Data
Once you’ve figured out the problem that your product is trying to solve, spread the word for it.
You can either use already available data or conduct surveys and researches of your own. (A free Google form or take professional services like that of Survey Monkey.)
The resultant data from this will be the most valuable asset for your company.
Analyse this data. Find out the age, education, location, preferences, everything about these respondents.
Finding the demographic of your potential buyers is the biggest advantage you can have.
A tech company can use its beta version to find out the demography and preferences of its target market as an easy tool.
Implement the analysis
Integrate the analysis of the above data into your marketing scheme.
Direct every action of yours towards reaching out this target market.
Your ultimate aim is to make it easy for your target market to find a direct relationship between your product and the problem that they face.
This examination of the cross-sectional data will help you boost your expected ROI.
You can also try the idea of writing blog posts around your product.
You can start a native blog like ours(using wordpress) or use an external service like Bloggers OutReach where they do all the work for you(including writing and publishing your blog post on a high quality blog related to your niche).
Re-asses and visit your plan
Be on a constant lookout for your competitor’s strategies, socio-political, geographical changes, tech developments in trends in your markets.
As a tech startup be dynamic and flexible with adapting your initial marketing plan to the changes in the target market and their behavior.
Conclusively,
Identifying and the right target market is imperative for any startup. Until you know the market you are serving to, you don’t have any potential sales.
The process of identifying your target market goes on till the time you haven’t actually made sales.
Tim Rettig writes for the Startup, “As long as your target customers haven’t already paid you real money, you are still making assumptions.”
