Frequently when I ask clients who their target market is, I get "everyone" as an answer. This used to drive me nuts when I was doing a lot of copywriting - should I start your copy with "Dear Mom" or "Hey Dude"!

Knowing your target market means you can:

a) Focus your message using the same language as your market and b) Target the benefits of your products and services that are most important to your specific audience.

Large companies spend a ton of money researching their target market to drill down to the most minute details. But it doesn't have to be costly or time consuming for an entrepreneur. It just requires some time and thought to simplify your target market.

Let's use Liz as an example. She's a composite of a couple of my clients.

Liz is a leadership coach with a background in banking. She's been a solo entrepreneur for 6 years. Since her background is in the corporate world, she decided she would target larger corporations with many managers assuming they need leadership development and have a good sized budget. But that's as far as she went with her targeting.

As a result, her clients ranged in size from 1000 to 10,000 were spread from California to New York and were in industries as diverse as insurance to oil production. Although Liz was happy to have the clients, she was unhappy traveling and didn't feel like she was leveraging her time and expertise.

These are the questions we asked to start narrowing her target market:

1. How can you categorize your clients? There are four ways to identify your target market: a) Geographics - location, size, etc b) Demographics - gender, income, etc c) Psychographics - general personality, benefits they are looking for, general characteristics, etc d) Behaviors - knowledge level, attitude, etc

Collect and analyze as much information about your current clients as you can. Identify patterns and commonalities among your current client base. If your business is new or you have a very small client base, what do you want your market to look like? Liz's clients were all over the board.

2. Which clients do you enjoy working with the most and why? Think about the characteristics of the individual companies, the people you must market to, or the end users. In Liz's case, she found that she enjoyed working with the HR departments of companies with fewer than 5000 employees. They are usually understaffed and happy to have support.

3. Which clients do you not enjoy working with and why? Once she started thinking about it, Liz realized there were two categories of clients that were difficult for her. Companies with large structured HR departments and those operating in a union environment were more challenging for her as a solo entrepreneur. Both had lots of rules and paperwork making her process more time consuming.

4. Which clients don't hesitate about paying your prices? We all want everyone to pay our prices without blinking but the reality is, everyone has a budget of some type. Liz realized it was the larger companies that gave her more of a problem about pricing. They thought they should get a discount since they might provide more work in the future.

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