You’ve got your brilliant idea for a start up, you’ve got a product that you’re certain people will be falling over each other to buy, and now you just have to get out there and sell the thing. So, you just need to find yourself some of those “customers” you’ve read so much about. How do you do that then?

Working out your target audience is one of the toughest marketing jobs there is. If you know who you’re selling to, it’s fairly straight forward to work out how to market to them, but actually finding that market is a challenge. Fortunately, we’re here to get you started.

Make It A Niche Market, No, A Really Niche Market

If you ask your average start-up who they want to sell their products to, the first answer that will pop into their heads is probably “Everyone”. This… isn’t much help. You can’t please all the people all the time. Instead, try and please one person all the time. Or at least, one very narrow demographic all the time. The more specific your target audience is, the easier it will be to aim your marketing at them.

Find a narrow group of people, and work out what they need and how your product meets that need. Everything else you do to market your company is an extension of this.

Work Out Why Anyone Would Buy Your Product

This is called an Initial Value Hypothesis. Decide what it is that’s special about your product and why customers in your narrowly selected target market would want to buy from you rather than any of your competitors. A common mistake many start-ups make is to stick religiously to their business plans. Don’t- none of your customers care about your business plan. All that matters is you work out what people want, and how you can sell it to them.

Put Your Ideas To The Test

Established companies are learning more and more about their customers every day. The big companies use everything from loyalty cards to iPhone apps to work out how their customers behave and what they prefer. Sometimes this gets to the point where it’s actively creepy, such as recently when Target’s marketing department figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before her dad did.

Now, as a start-up, you don’t really have access to all that Orwellian machinery, so you’re going to have to test out your ideas in much smaller arenas. Some of the ways to do this include surveys and polls.

A particularly useful one is to arrange a one on one meeting with someone in your target market, and simply talk to them. The trick to making this work is not to lead your interviewee. Ask them about problems in the area of your product. Ask what they would be looking for in a product to solve that problem. The results might surprise you.

Offering free samples to see how people respond to them

Equally, a good option is to collaborate with other businesses in your industry. It’s easy to get paranoid and insular with your “industry secrets” but sharing knowledge can actually help everyone involved.

Draw a Portrait of Your Perfect Customer

By now you should be fairly well along in your market research. You’ll have found a narrow demographic you want to sell to, worked out why they would want to buy your product, and talked to members of that demographic to get a better idea of how they think and what they’re looking for in a product. At this point you can start thinking about customer relationship management, or CRM, by creating a custom profile of your target customer, using all the information you have gathered..

Apply What You’ve Learned

Now it’s time to put what you’ve learned into action. Has what you’ve learned changed your business plan? Is there anything that needs to change about the way you present your products, how you sell them, or even the products themselves?

If you’ve gone through this whole process and not discovered anything that needs changing, then it’s possible you’ve not been doing it properly.

Barry Magennis is an SEO executive working with Haymarket Business Media. In his spare time, he writes about numerous subjects, including jobs in media.