Taking Time to Define Your Target Market
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If you are starting a consulting business or are already involved in the profession you need to understand and be able to clearly define your target market. Knowing who this group of people is actually goes hand in hand with defining your consulting niche. It is one of the factors in determining where your firm succeeds or not.
Let's take an example of an internet consulting company. It is not enough just to say "our target marketing is website owners". That is a great start but you really need to take time to study and define who exactly those website owners are. Are they small businesses in the finance sector? Are they restaurant owners that have or want websites? Or are they students with blogs and social media needs? You need to really narrow the group down.
After you have been able to define the age, gender, general income levels, and lifestyles of your potential clients that you are targeting you can then start to think a bit more about you're pricing set up of your consultancy. Remember depending on who you are offering your consulting services to you'll be able to charge different amounts of money.
The next thing you can start looking at is developing your visual brand identity. If you know who your target market is it will be much easier to come up with visuals that will appeal and attract them. Most companies come up with graphic identities before they have clearly defined their target market and that is often why brands do not stand the test of time.
Once you have determined your visual brand, understand your demographics and the pricing that you'll be going after only then can you start to think a bit more about what kind of promotional campaigns you'll want to employ to get your message out. This way you will have a clear picture of what kind of media outlets you should be considering, and what "tone" to use in your promotional and media campaigns.
These are just some of the steps that you really need to consider before anything. Remember that even though it is exciting to start your business as quickly as possible you really need to define your target market and also do market research before anything else. If you do a good job of those two steps you'll be way ahead of so many other consultants out there and therefore have a way higher chance of succeeding in the consulting field.