Anuncier
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Target Market Strategies: Build a Smarter Marketing Plan
Finding and understanding your target market will go a long way to formulate your sales and marketing strategies.
Start With Your Target Market
At Anuncier, we’re often asked questions like:
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“What marketing channel works best?”
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“What kind of content should I create?”
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“When’s the best time to send an email?”
While these are important, they all need to be answered under the context of: Who are you trying to reach? Before any marketing tactic can be effective, you need a firm grasp of your target market strategy.
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It’s surprising how many businesses can’t clearly define their target market or target audience. Without this clarity, even the best channels and content strategies will fall flat—or cost far more than they should.
What Is a Target Market?
Your target market is the group of people (or businesses) most likely to buy your product or service. It defines the broader category of potential customers, guiding your messaging, channel selection, and even product development. Many people also search for how to find a target market, and it starts with understanding that this is not the same as your target audience or market segments. While all are connected, your target market is the broader group that provides direction for your entire marketing strategy. Understanding your target market and having a strong strategy is the foundation of successful marketing.
How to Find Your Target Market: Start With Your Business Model
When you want to start to develop and defining your target market, start by identifying your business model:
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B2B (Business-to-Business): You sell to other businesses.
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B2C (Business-to-Consumer): You sell directly to individuals.
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This distinction shapes everything—from the characteristics you use to define your market to the channels and content that will be most effective.
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Finding Your Target Market For B2B Organizations
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When developing your target market, we use attributes or characteristics. These characteristics will provide guidance and clarity for the marketing strategy. The two primary B2B characteristics we recommend starting with are:
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Industry type: Use tools like NAICS or SIC codes to help define this characteristic.
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Business function: Operations, Growth, Finance, Administration, HR
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In some cases, this is all you would need to develop the target market. However, depending on your product or services it may be necessary to dive further in which you might need additional characteristics like:
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Company size and revenue
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Location or sector within an industry
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For startups and smaller businesses, we typically recommend focusing on one industry and one function. The more you can define your target market the better it will help clarify which marketing channels and messaging to use. There is going to be a delicate balance between defining your target market and market size - the more you can define your target market the smaller the market size. If you’re seeing a mix of industries or roles, you’re likely venturing into market segmentation, which is valuable—but clarity comes first.
How to Find a Target Market for B2C Brands
In B2C marketing, your target market most likely defined more by demographics, some common demographics to help with the target market strategy are:
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Age
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Gender
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Income
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Education
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Race
There are other characteristics that may be used to define your target market or can be layered in: geographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. Tools like VALS (Values and Lifestyles) and AIO variables (Activities, Interests, Opinions) can help you refine these further.​
An example: A watch company targeting women ages 30–65 has a clear target market. Within that, they may identify different target audiences (like watches for business or leisure) for different product lines or campaigns.
Understanding Market Segmentation
Market segmentation is the process of dividing your target market into smaller, more specific groups. Market Segments will have the same goals, challenges and pain points (aka your Target Market), but may prioritize in a different manner. Market Segments may also have additional characteristics and factors that may need to be considered. Understanding and defining Market Segments helps you deliver more relevant messages and improve conversion rates.
You may want to segment your market if:
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Different customer groups use your product/service in different ways
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Perception or value varies across customer groups
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You want to test new messaging or channels
Examples of Market Segments
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For B2B: A SaaS product might serve the healthcare industry as a target market, and might segment the industry by business size or specialty.
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For B2C: A company that makes outdoor furniture might have a target market of people who own homes, and a market segment of different home types or home locations.
Remember: If the group shares common traits, it's part of your target market. If you're refining that group into smaller clusters with distinct needs, you're creating market segments.
Target Market Sizing
A crucial part of your target market strategy is sizing the opportunity. Your target market size is the estimated number of potential customers you can realistically serve. Target market sizes are constantly changing and it can be difficult to accurately define what the perfect target market size is, however generally you just want to make sure you are not too broad or too niche. That can lead to these challenges:
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Too broad? You might get lost in the noise, can be very hard to establish foothold.
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Too niche? You may have a product or service with a limited runway.
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Formal tools like Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Serviceable Available Market (SAM) analyses can help you quantify market potential. Talking to a marketing strategist (like us at Anuncier) can help you align your goals with the right-sized market.
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We shared a few things we look at in our guide to the right. This is not a checklist, rather points or discussions to consider.
Can You Have More Than One Target Market?
In some cases—especially for large businesses or nonprofits—you might need more than one target market. For most startups, small businesses, and small nonprofits, we recommend to stick to one target market.
Why?
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Spreading too wide means diluted messaging.
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It allows you to focus, and excel in that market.
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It’s harder to gain traction or make meaningful marketing decisions.
If you feel like you have multiple markets, consider whether you’re actually looking at market segments or target audiences within one market. As you grow, you can expand into additional markets—strategically.
Why Target Market Strategy Matters
Target market strategies aren’t just marketing jargon—they’re the strategic engine behind your business growth. They influence everything from:
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Marketing channel selection
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Messaging tone and content
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Product development
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Customer journey design
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A well-defined target market means you’re no longer guessing—you’re guiding every marketing dollar and message with purpose. Having a clear target market allows you to establish metrics that can be used to measure how the strategy is (or is not) working and make the necessary adjustments. This will help when using tools like Google Analytics, CRM tools and other options.
Final Thoughts and The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
If you're wondering how to find your target market or how to build an effective target market strategy, you're not alone. At Anuncier, we help businesses find their target market and refine their target market strategies so they can grow with clarity and confidence. Whether you're just starting out or need to re-focus, getting this step right is essential.
We mention TAM and SAM as tools to help define target market another key tool (primarily for B2B organizations) that can help with understanding your target market is an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The ICP allows you and your team to clearly articulate what your target market 'looks like'. Developing the ICP is a process that we work with organizations to achieve.
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Want help shaping your target market? Contact us today to get started.
