This week’s reading is primarily focusing on how to define your target market and target audience, and more importantly how to develop content strategy and revenue strategy.

Target market means what group of people you are trying to sell your product to. For example, you can target kids, college students, young people, adults age 30-50, elderly people, etc. After considering target market, startup founders need to focus on their target audience. It means who builds up that market particularly. For instance, they could be elementary school students, young people who love games, adults during career transitions, or older people who just retired. In conclusion, our customers are consisted of our target market and target audience. Check out this YouTube video if you need more clarification.

Before knowing the specific target market of your product, you need to do tons of research. How to Define Your Target Market tells us to analyze the demographics of an area, such as age, location, gender, income level, education level, family status, occupation and ethnic background. We need to figure out who is our potential customer and who would like to buy our product. Besides of this, in order to find best product/market fit, we also need to analyze the psychographics of our market, such as customers’ personality, attitudes, values, interests, lifestyles and behavior. In a word, we have to find out how our product will fit into customers’ life and through what channels we could distribute the information of our product to potential customers.

After determining the appropriate target market and audience, we should evaluate our decision in various aspects. First of all, we may ask ourselves that is our target market big enough? This is really important because the size of the market directly relates to whether the product has the potential for sustainable development. Further, we have to consider are we creating product/market fit. The product is supposed to solve some problems for our customers so that they will have a desire to buy it. Lastly, we should think about do we understand our customers enough. We need to know how they make their decisions, can they afford the product, and more importantly, how well do the distribution channels reach our target audience.

As startup founders, how will we develop our business strategies? The New Business Models for News Toolkit from Tow-Knight Center points out it’s really crucial for founders to build marketing and branding strategy after figuring out their potential customers.

First and foremost, determining the overall goal of your product helps the founder stay top of everything and have a clear understanding of what makes your product unique. Moreover, trying to attract the proper advertisers who have the most potential to reach more related audiences is the key for revenue strategy. So before signing contract with particular advertisers, we should know about what are they currently advertising, what did they advertise in the past, and what type of brand they are conveying in general. Last but not least, analyzing our direct and indirect competitors is really vital because we can better differentiate ourselves and attract more customers by knowing better about our opponents.