PVP – Finding Your Target Market

As a small business owner, narrowing your focus to a target market is how you will be able to best leverage your resources to gain customers. Long gone are the days where casting a wide net and sifting through unqualified leads made sense.

When you focus on a target market, you’ve already done part of  the work to qualify incoming leads. This allows your marketing dollars to be as effective as possible.

Finding your target market is the key to creating effective messaging. So how to find just exactly what that is? In my last blog I wrote about PVP- personal fulfillment, value to the marketplace, and profitability. Here’s how you can use this to establish your target market.

Each category is to be rated on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, for each type of customer you have. Here are some examples, based on Pup’s Grooming:

Owners with one cat:

Personal fulfillment -2 Value to the marketplace-10 Profitability-6

Owners with multiple cats:

Personal Fulfillment– 2 Value to the marketplace-10 Profitability-8

Owners with one dog:

Personal Fulfillment– 8 Value to the marketplace-7 Profitability– 7

Owners with multiple dogs:

Personal Fulfillment– 8 Value to the marketplace-8 Profitability– 9

Now, take the average of each type of customer to find the highest value of PVP. This will indicate your  target market; ensuring the best balance between your personal satisfaction in serving this type of customer and how much the market will bear (value to the market), and what profit is to be made.

In this scenario, the highest rating goes to the owners with multiple dogs. Here’s why the numbers ended up as they did. You may not realize this, but just about no one likes to have to groom a cat. That’s because, generally, cats hate being groomed, making the whole experience hard and miserable for both sides. That is why the personal fulfillment ratings for owners with cats is so low.

For that same reason, the value to the marketplace is high for cat owners. This may be a unique situation, but because cats are more difficult to groom, it is easier to have them groomed by a professional than to do it yourself at home. Cat owners put a great value on this service (especially for older cats who require more grooming).

Time is typically your highest expense. The profitability ratings for cats and dogs are somewhat similar. Liability has to be factored in for this particular example however, since cats hate to be groomed (generally), it stresses them out and  therefore is a higher risk of injury to the cat.

Let’s take a look at how refining your target market will affect your messaging and promotions.

A promotion for an owner of multiple dogs might go something like this:

For the month of February get buy one get one free for a nail trim.  or

For the month of February get a free nail trim with every bath.

You’d want to use pictures of your doggy friends on flyers, social media, website and email marketing campaigns rather than cats. You could target your promotions for areas where dog owners are more likely to go- dog parks, pet bakeries and other boutique pet stores, dog trainers, etc.

It’s easy to see how, once you’ve really narrowed your target market, you can make your marketing dollars even more effective. This is especially important for small business owners.

Resources for this blog: Dib, Allan. The One-Page Marketing Plan. Successwise, 2016.