3 Questions to Help Identify Your New Franchise’s Target Market
3 Questions to Help Identify Your New Franchise’s Target Market
You’ve opened the doors of your new franchise – congratulations! Now it’s time to start marketing, i.e., getting the word out about your business to your community. However, before you start spending your marketing dollars willy-nilly, have you stopped to consider who you want to market to?
Before you say “everyone,” just know that keeping your audience as broad as possible is not necessarily a recipe for success. The key ingredient to a successful marketing plan is identifying your target market, and yes, you have one! A target market is:
- a group of people
- with some shared characteristics
- that are potential customers for your products
To start the process of finding these people, you have to be a little introspective. These questions should get you on the right track. Start by determining:
1) Who is already buying from you?
To identify the types of people you should market to, the easiest place to start is by analyzing who has bought from you already. Examine your list of customers and define what characteristics, or demographics, they have in common, such as age, gender, location, income level, profession, hobbies, and interests.
Hold on, you say. I’m the owner of a brand-new franchise, and I haven’t exactly built up a huge pool of customers yet. Well, you’re in the perfect position for a little field research. Pay attention to the types of customers walking through the door at your company’s other franchise locations and keep an eye on who is purchasing from your competitors, too. Do you notice more men, women, or families at these establishments? Are they a certain age? Are you trying to attract the same customers as your competitors, or can you identify a niche market your competitor is missing?
2) Who is looking for you?
A helpful way to identify your target market other than by demographics is based on purchase intention, or those in your community looking for your services. What makes people seek out your franchise, and what makes them alike?
Let’s say you offer lawn and landscaping services as part of a home services franchise. Consider what needs you are filling for your customer, and what purpose they have in coming to you. Your customers probably don’t live in an apartment or a dense downtown area. At the very least, they own a lawn, and they need help maintaining it. Perhaps they are a homeowner in the suburbs with little time to mow and weed, and they have disposable income to afford lawn services.
What can you extrapolate about your target market’s age and potential professional level from these assumptions? If you’re looking at two neighborhoods in your city to send out a direct mail campaign, and one has more apartments, in which neighborhood would you focus your efforts?
3) Who is not going to buy your offerings?
Sometimes, the quickest way to pin down who your customers are is by figuring out who your customers aren’t. If you are the owner of a home healthcare franchise, you are probably not going to (or want to) attract young couples or college students. So don’t spend time trying to market to this group of people.
Find out who you need to market to instead (such as middle-aged folks needing assistance caring for an elderly relative, or senior citizens looking for some help at home) and find out what advertising mediums these people read and watch. Don’t worry about the latest trends in marketing to Gen Z if you know they’re not in your target market. What are the tried-and-true mediums you can use to attract your type of customer?
So How Do I Find These People?
So, you’ve identified that your target market is homeowners between the ages of 35 – 55 who live in the suburbs. Great. How do you go about contacting them? Start your research. Look online for studies about your target market and what others have done to reach them. Search for the social media sites they frequent, publications they read, and channels they watch.
When you’re ready to set up a campaign for your target market, Xpressdocs can help. We have solutions like mailing list services to pinpoint your direct mail campaigns based on customer demographics, and marketing automation to make frequent touchpoints a cinch. With over 20 years of experience as a marketing partner for franchises, we assist you with all of your marketing efforts, all from one platform.