Struggling to attract enough customers? One possible reason for this could be that your target market is too narrow. Expanding your target market could give you access to more customers and could help you to secure more sales. Below are just a few different ways to expand your target market and some of the important things to consider when expanding.
Diversify your products/services
One way to expand your target market is to start selling new products or services. These could be products or services that you know are popular and are therefore likely to help you secure more sales (they could even be products or services that customers have asked for in the past).
Make sure that your new product or service is relevant to your brand. If you sell guitars, you may be able to branch out into amps and guitar accessories – but you should be wary of selling other musical instruments if guitars are a big part of your brand identity. If you want to focus on an entirely different product, a complete rebrand may be necessary.
When offering new products and services, bear in mind that you may have to undergo new training, as well as training your employees. There may also be added costs in diversifying your product line.
Target new age/gender demographics
Consider whether you could be targeting a new age range or appealing to all genders. For instance, if you run a personal training business that is mainly targeted at young men, consider whether you could be aiming your services at women or an older audience too.
This may involve introducing new products or services to cater to these demographics, or it could involve simply altering your marketing – by focusing new campaigns at other demographics you can start to pick up these types of customers.
Offer new payment options
It’s possible that you could be limiting your target market by only accepting certain payment options. New payment options could include accepting credit card, offering installment plans or even accepting other currencies.
Accepting other payment options could involve extra costs (such merchant fees) or there could be added work involved (such as chasing up customers when offering installment plans). Weigh up how likely customers are to use these extra payments options and whether it is worth the added costs and hassle.
Sell to customers in other locations
If your audience is very local, consider whether it could be time to sell to a larger area. You could even consider selling to customers in other countries if you’ve got a unique product to offer. This could give you access to many more customers.
When selling to customers in other locations, make sure to research these locations to see what competition there is. Ideally, you want there to be a demand for your product but not so much competition that the market is saturated. When it comes to selling abroad, consider that there may be added costs and legal requirements to consider. With the help of a leading customs brokerage service, you can negotiate this. Make sure that the cost of selling abroad is not too high so that it severely damages your profits.
Try new marketing channels
How do you currently market your product? Could there be extra marketing channels worth exploiting? If you do all of your marketing offline, you could expand your target market simply by doing some online marketing. Even if you do promote your company online already, consider whether you could be targeting new social media platforms or using different PPC platforms.
