Targeting your market is a basic requirement for effective marketing, and without it, all your marketing efforts are in vain. Your content can be the most engaging, relevant and inspiring but if it is not getting to the right people, it is practically useless.

Marketing techniques, like personalization, can only work if you identify and target your audience. For any B2B company, identifying and targeting their audience is the first most crucial step toward successful B2B marketing.

Let's discuss how to go about identifying your B2B target market.

Identifying Your B2B Target Market

Identifying your B2B target market is not the easiest of processes and, more importantly, it is an ever-changing aspect of marketing. Which means you need to learn and adapt overtime, as you move forward with changing demands.

Here are the steps you can follow while identifying your B2B target market.

Know Your Product's Worth

Knowing what your product or service is providing to customers is the first step in identifying your target market. You need to know what solutions you meet for your customers and what pain points you address with your product or service.

Ask yourself the following questions to know your product's value to customers:

·         What problems and pain points are your products or services solving?

·         What demands is your product or service meeting in your addressable market?

Learn from Your Existing Customers

It is always good practice to learn from the data of your existing customer base when identifying your B2B target market.

You can gather a lot of this data through sales, surveys, and CRM data, to learn about your customers' behaviors, preferences, demands and pain points. Using this data, or information, you can correctly identify the common characteristics that determine which customers are most profitable and why.

Learn from Your Competition

Knowing, understanding and learning from your competition is close to the only benefit you can reap from them. Look at who they are targeting to get a better understanding of the kind of people, who may become your potential customers, or target market.

It will also help you understand whether there are prospects you can attract from your competitor’s market, or if there is an opportunity for a new market.

Narrow Down

By now, you should have enough understanding of who your audience is, which means you should now start narrowing down the segment of the market that you want to target. One of the best ways to do this is by creating buyer personas and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs).

Be as specific as you can when creating your ICPs to help narrow down your target market accurately. For a B2B company, this means considering technographics, like ERP and CRM, and firmographics, like industry and company size.

Test Your Target Market

Testing is important because it tells you who is responding to what, where adjustments are needed in your marketing strategy and, most importantly, whether you are targeting the right people or not. Test your target market and adjust accordingly.

It is also important to keep testing after you have identified your target market because it helps learn about further changes in your market.

Conclusion

The 'spray and pray' method of targeting everyone and hoping for the best may have worked in the past but it does not work in the modern world. Identifying your B2B target market is crucial for efficiency and to save time, efforts and other precious resources which can be utilized elsewhere instead.

If you want to learn more about identifying target markets for your B2B company, or about sales and marketing in general, please visit our website today.