How To Identify The Target Market For a Retail Business

One of the biggest mistakes new retail business owners make is blindly opening a store without researching their target market. Unless you know this information, you won't be able to make educated decisions on marketing, location and store setup, which in turn increases your chances of failure. Launching a successful retail business is no easy task, but you can increases your chances of success by identifying your target market. But what exactly is the target market? And how can you use this to your advantage? To learn the answers to these questions and more, keep reading.

There are some general questions you should ask yourself to better identify your target market. While you may already know the answers to some of these questions, you may need to do a little digging to find the rest. Here's a short list of some questions to help you identify your retail business's target market:

• What age group typically buys my store's product?
• Are customers mostly male, female, or mixed?
• Where do my customers typically come from? Are they local? Or do they travel from a nearby city? Tip: ask for customers zip codes when they check out to determine this information.
• How many customers come back for future purchases?
• What are some of the social characteristics of my customers?
• What about the marital status of my customers?
• What is their typical education level?

How To Use This Information

Acquiring some (or all) of the information listed above will help you make smarter professional decisions when running your retail business. Once you've identified your target market, you can then shift your focus towards the main group of people who purchase your store's products. For instance, radio and television stations offer their demographic data to potential advertisers. Running either a radio or television commercial on a station with a demographic that matches your store's target market will offer the greatest return on your investment.

You can also use this information to choose new products for your store. Let's say you own a retail fashion boutique that sells mostly to females between the ages of 21-28. You could contact some distributors to see if you can get trendy new apparel and accessories that young women would likely purchase.

Now for the question that's likely burning a hold in your mind -- how do I gather target market data on my retail store? There are several different ways to gather this information, one of which is through the site ZipSkinny.com; you simply enter your zip code and the website reveals tons of useful data for that particular location.