5 Essential Markets to Consider Before Deciding on Your Target Customer

You can have the best product ever invented and still not be successful, if you target the wrong market. Knowing who to sell to and what their appetite is for the product is absolutely critical—and may be a bit challenging.

Author Ryan Levesque, to the rescue. In his book “Choose,” Levesque helps guide us through target market selection by identifying 5 essential markets to consider. Let’s walk through them.

An evergreen plant’s leaves stay green all year round. They never change. You can probably guess how this market got its name. In an evergreen market, interest persists for the long haul. This is no place for passing fads. The evergreen market is here to stay.

Know anyone who’s super into soap carving? Me neither, but soap carving enthusiasts are out there. So are all kinds of other enthusiasts—people who are very into something and willing to pay for it. The more enthusiastic the enthusiast, the more they’re likely to spend supporting their interest.

A $10,000 problem is no small problem. A $100 problem, on the other hand, is what it is. If you target customers who all have a $100 problem with a $1,000 solution, you have a big problem yourself.

With a high-ticket problem, 1 percent of your target audience [WA1] must be willing to hand over a gob of money for you to solve their problem. So, you have to choose a market that has a big enough problem.

Let’s say you create an online course on how to fix your toilet. Great, people need that. However, once they’ve fixed it, there’s no reason for them to re-engage with you. Game over.

Now, let’s say you offer a “Do it yourself home fixes” series, which includes a course on how to fix your toilet, as well as all kinds of other courses on topics that may be of interest to your customers in the future. Now they have a reason to engage with you again and again. That’s a future problem market. The benefit of this market is that it’s 7 times easier to sell to a customer you’ve already done transactional business with than to get a new one.

I hear this most frequently from female founders: “Well, a lot of people are coming to me. But none of them have any money.” Okay, why did you market to somebody who has no money? Solopreneurs or people working with under 5 employees are known as nano and micro businesses. Those people have no money because, if they had money, they’d hire help.[WA2]

The fix is simple: pick a target that has players with money in it. It doesn’t have to be the whole market. But you do need about 10 percent of the target to have money to part with.

Do you need to revisit your target markets? Our Revenue Review Workbook helps you identify not only WHO is making purchases from you, but also when and how much. It is an essential tool for evaluating the efficacy of your current market, as well as where there is the opportunity for growth of new markets.