Target market — definition, purpose, and tools

Understanding who your business serves — your target market — is an important step to running a successful business. In this post, we’ll give you a target market definition, steps to define your target market, and tools to help you improve your marketing efforts.

This post will explain:

• What is a target market?
• Steps to define your target market
• Tools to help you target your market better

What is a target market?

A target market is a specific group of potential customers who a business aims to reach with its products or services. This group may share common characteristics such as age, gender, income level, education, interests, or geographic location that make them more likely to be interested in and purchase from a business.

Defining a target market is an important part of developing a marketing strategy because it helps businesses focus their efforts on people who are likely to buy their products or services. Understanding the needs and preferences of a target market helps businesses tailor their messaging, products, and pricing strategies to appeal to those customers — and ultimately increase sales and profitability.

For example, a retailer selling women’s clothing would want to target women based on ages, income levels, and geographic locations that are most likely to make a purchase. Once they understand who they are serving, they can present the clothing options that align with their target audience’s purchasing habits.

Steps to define your target market

Now that you have a better understanding of target markets, let’s take a look at how businesses should go about determining who their target audience is.

• Research your market. The first step is understanding as much as you can about who you are serving. When you have a better understanding of your audience and what they care about, you can adjust your marketing and product offering to resonate with them.
• Segment your market. Once you understand who your potential customers are, you should break them into smaller segments that you can focus on. This allows you to target customers with more specific messages they actually care about.
• Set your target customers. Now that you know who your business is serving, you can select which segments you will focus on most — and who you will target.

Tools to help you target your market better

Knowing who makes up your target market helps improve your marketing campaigns, product offerings, and messaging. Evaluate your business to see if it has a viable method for refining and targeting specific markets. Then consider whether you have the software or tools you need to effectively define and reach your target audience.

Adobe Audience Manager

Adobe Audience Manager turns insights into action. As a data management solution, it collects and merges information from practically any source, building intelligent audience segments that give you a complete view of your customers. With attribute-based audiences, lookalike modeling, and more, Audience Manager helps you take charge of your customer experiences and extend your reach further than before.

Adobe Target

Built for marketers, Adobe Target makes it easy to perform testing, measurement, and optimization, all without writing code. With the power of unified customer profiles and machine learning from Adobe Sensei, Target personalizes experiences based on historical behavior rather than the latest transaction.

Watch the Adobe Target overview video to learn how it can help you test and optimize to more effectively reach your target market.