How to find the target market for your new business.

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners first convince themselves of the value of their idea, then they proceed to convince those in their circle of friends and family that the idea has value. The positive feedback from friends and family then fuels unwarranted optimism in the new business business idea.

Your friends, family and business associates can easily become an echo chamber of false positive or false negative input.

To determine the validity of your new business idea, you must identify and engage with individuals that you believe will benefit from or be a customer of your new startup.

The first step is to identify your primary target market. You start that process by simply thinking and documenting who you think your primary customer would be.

Use your knowledge and experience along with basic research tools to help you identify a primary target market for your new business. Who is the person most likely to have a need for your product or service? What need do they have that your product or service will solve for them?

Your goal is to identify one or maybe more potential target markets,

Then, you will do the research that will give you the insight to start building a profile or persona of your ideal customer, your target market. You want to know as much as possible about them.

For this research there are multiple sources you can utilize. Some of the primary ones are:

Demographic data from the US Census Bureau.

Social media audience data tools such as Facebook Audience creation tool or LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Psychographic data from sources like Claritas.

If your market is other businesses, search industry buyer data from any industry resource you can find.

As you do the market research, you should be able to determine the market with the most need for your product, their actual level of need, what they are doing presently to address that need and what might convince them to use your product or service.

If you take the time to fully identify and document the demographics, the characteristics, the needs, behaviors, attitudes, motivations and challenges of your ideal customer.

With a holistic view of your ideal customer, you can now work to find where those customers are and engage directly with them to get input.