6 Key Target Market Examples (+How to Find & Reach Yours)

What is a Target Market?

A target market is a group of people or businesses you plan to approach with your product or service. That group has shared characteristics that might be:

• Demographic: age, geographic location, gender, marital status, education level
• Behavioral: technology enthusiast, lifestyles, purchasing habits,
• Psychographic: values, beliefs, virtues

One important aspect that turns a set of people or organizations into a target market is their connection with each other. The people or organizations should have a common medium of communication where they exchange ideas, feedback, and reviews.

Why Is Your Target Market Important

Defining a target market helps by providing a specific profile of your target audience. This helps identify and reach out to them with an effective message that addresses their needs.

A validated target market definition can significantly improve the efficiency of your go-to-market strategy, increase your success rate, and reduce the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC).

6 Key Target Market Examples

To better understand what target market is and how it helps companies be successful, let’s go through a few examples of famous companies.

Airbnb

Big and mature companies like Airbnb have different target market segments. This is not unusual and helps businesses differentiate their revenue streams, making them more resilient to temporary fluctuations.

Travelers Seeking Unique Accommodations

No hotel chain in the world offers the option of sleeping in a tent, RV, or iglu. Airbnb's unique selling point makes it attractive and the go-to place for people who want to find unique experiences and avoid traditional hotel rooms.

Families

At the same time, Airbnb is attractive to families with kids who need more amenities, especially for stays longer than a week. A hotel room can rarely offer a full kitchen, dining table, or kids' playground, which is essential for a family to feel as if they are at home (or at least as close as possible to that).

Patagonia

Entrepreneurs often use external characteristics to define their customers when considering their market: age, country, and educational background. These characteristics can easily be used on platforms like LinkedIn to identify thousands, if not millions, of representatives of that group.

Other companies decide to pick a market identified by their internal characteristics like beliefs and values. This helps them build strong relationships with their customers and high customer loyalty. Patagonia is an excellent example of that.

Environmentally conscious outdoor enthusiasts

Instead of striving for cheap mass-production products, Patagonia builds a brand that offers sustainable, durable, high-quality products that appeal to nature lovers. The company discovered the strong connection between outdoor activities like climbing and people's responsibility to the environment and built a product that addresses that need. As a result, they are one of the most successful companies in their industry, even though they consistently try to persuade their customers to buy fewer items.

Netflix

You are probably well aware of Netflix's traditional market. However, lately, they are expanding into a new target market that can significantly improve their business metrics.

Sports Enthusiasts and Fans

The company originally started as a streaming service for movies and TV shows. Lately, it has entered the sports streaming business. This addresses the needs of sports fans, primarily males up to middle age, who are passionate about their favorite teams and leagues and value the convenience of watching games at home in real-time or on-demand when they need to catch up. It builds on traditional sports watching by providing interactive features like commentary, stats, etc.

Coursera

Coursera is one of the most diversified companies in the EdTech space, targeting multiple significant markets.

Consumers

Coursera sells directly to individuals who can fall into several categories:

• Career starters looking to find their first job
• Career switchers looking to change their role and find their first job in a different space
• Career advancers looking to grow professionally in their current role

Businesses

These companies or universities offer Coursera’s services as additional benefits to their employees or students.

Public Organisations

Governments and public sector organizations are other groups that must provide their citizens with educational services.

Degrees

Coursera offers a marketplace for degree credentials offered by universities looking to expand their reach and find new students using the online channels as a platform.

On the other hand, this offering is appealing to students who are not happy with their local higher education options and are looking for affordable options that don’t require reallocation but are still credible and well-recognized.

SpaceX

SpaceX is one of the most innovative companies in the space sector. They invented a new approach to rocket engineering that brought down the costs of launching a rocket and made it possible to have a rocket launch almost every day, significantly improving access to space. Their traditional target market is government agencies and space programs, but let’s look at what other markets they are targeting.

Private Companies

By democratizing access to space, SpaceX and companies like EnduroSat made it possible for companies that are not in the space sector to benefit from space technologies and deliver value to their customers.

Planet Labs provides high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface to agriculture, environment monitoring, and urban planning companies to help them make better decisions based on real-time data.

Space Tourists

Bringing down the cost of a rocket launch and the invention of a new crew capsule unlocks the opportunity for non-professional astronauts to go to space. This further supports the success of various space programs by adding a new revenue stream to their business.

Canva

Canva is one of the hottest tools in the design space. Surprisingly, it has reached the top by targeting non-designers.

Canva allows people without design experience and skills to create good-looking visual artifacts with minimum effort and time. It uses a rich collection of templates as starting points and intuitive design commands, resulting in a huge productivity boost for people who occasionally need design services but are not designers themselves.

However, non-professional designers includes significant part of the population of the planet. Let’s dive deeper.

Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

These are people between 25 and 50 years old with low to medium income. The location is irrelevant, although the English language is a requirement. These people need to create social media posts, logos, presentations, or flyers to support their business.

Educators and Students

The rapid digitalization of the educational process in the past several years is pushing more and more teachers to use software products to improve or entirely facilitate their teaching process. Canva provides templates that empower teachers to quickly create engaging presentation to support their classes.

On the other hand, digital skills are become more and more important subject in for students as they prepare for job readiness. In that aspect, Canva is a great tool for students to support their projects and presentations with visualing appealing images.

Social Media Managers and Content Creators

More enterprise features like brand kits and content scheduling makes Canva a great asset for marketing and social media professionals looking for speed and prefer to work independently.

How to Find Your Target Market

Defining your specific target market is a cornerstone of your business model. It’s best to make that decision based on as many sources of information as possible.

Conduct a Market Research

The best starting point is to conduct your market research using customer interviews. By interviewing potential customers, you will learn a lot about their needs and previous experience addressing them.

Analyze Competitors

From the customer interviews you conducted in the previous step, there will be existing alternatives for solving the customer problem that naturally arises in the conversations.

These alternatives might be direct or indirect competitors or just an alternative way to get the job done. It’s important to understand where are the gaps in the current solution and what the disconnect is between customer expectations and the available alternatives. Also, note where and how your customers found this solution, as this will inform your marketing strategy down the road.

Leverage Analytics Tools

If you have an existing customer base, get as much behavioral information as possible about your current customers. This can help you isolate the buyer persona but can also inform your negative buyer persona.

Create Buyer Personas

The final step is to create a profile that represents your buyer. You will likely need more than one persona to represent your target market accurately, as customer interviews will reveal important nuances about your target customers.

The Icanpreneur Way to Nail Your Target Market

Icanpreneur is a platform that helps entrepreneurs and product leaders identify their target market based on real-world data. The platform provides interview scripts built based on the industry’s best practices for product research and specifically adapted for your business idea using the latest AI technologies. There is an interview script for different occasions:

• Customer problem validation interview
• Buyer persona interview
• Win/loss customer interview

The platform additionally helps with conducting, documenting, and analyzing the interviews. It provides a deep analysis of the insights uncovered in your research and tips for improving your customer interview execution.

The insights from the customer interviews are the foundation for multiple important artifacts:

• Investor pitch deck
• Landing page or homepage with strong positioning and messaging
• Marketing campaign for reaching out to your target audience

Reaching Your Target Market

One important aspect your customer interviews will reveal is how to reach your target market. By uncovering the stories of your potential customers, you will gain a deep understanding of their buying behavior and decision-making, allowing you to approach them at the right place and time with the messaging that resonates with them.

Wrap Up

A well-defined target market based on real-world data is foundational for building a sustainable and effective business model. Icanpreneur makes this process straightforward and provides all the needed guidance, examples, and tooling so entrepreneurs and product leaders can confidently navigate it.