Sunday 6 January 2008

Target Market

A few days ago our European Street Team Members had an appointment at the chatroom. Our subject was: Target Market. To put everything in a row and to review our conversations I made some notes and here are the results of a 4 hour chat session:
Target Market:
Most economists would suggest that BEFORE you start selling, you should look for your Target market. So if you think about selling bags (handmade or not) for example, you should think about what kind of bags you would like to sell and how large the target market would be. With bags you have all kind of styles and purposes, like how large is the target market for bold colored girly bags? Or laptop cases? Or just ordinary bags for daily use? Do women buy more bags or men? And who spend most of there money on bags? Housewives or working women? Younger or older women? If you go on thinking this way you will soon find the perfect market. Of course you also will have to look out for competition, if there is much, you will have to give it a different twist or have to offer great price deals.
While as artist with handmade things is a whole different story: You first start to make your things and when you hear nice reactions you start to think about your options how to make money with your passion. So as artist we start maybe the wrong way; we do not look for our Target Market nor competition when we do our ‘thing’. Handmade is always unique but still there are many artists who make alike things, with or without knowing that they even have competition.
So what do we, artists, have to do? How or why do we have to find our Target Market?
During our 4 hour chat session soon everyone noticed lacks in their way of selling like bad pictures, wrongly priced items and most of us never really had thought about our target.
First things that came up for Target were age, gender and style. And after that how large our Target would be with those in mind and how we could make our target larger. Knowing your target can effect you whole way of selling; style, item descriptions, how and where to advertise and so on.
We have been thinking about asking our customers a few questions to learn more about our customers so also to know who our target really is. Questions like there age, style, taste and hobbies could be very helpful. One member (PaperFlowerGirl) suggested to give the customers a nice extra gift for taking the time to answer the sellers questions. That is indeed a great idea but not everyone would feel comfortable to ask these questions, nor everyone would like to answer them. It is indeed difficult to find your Target Market if you already have started to make your items, hopefully we will learn more soon, maybe in our next chat appointment?
We are now busy with finding a way to get a bigger audience for our shops. Especially EUROPE could be a great Target Market for us, European sellers. We have to use our advantages of being geographically closer to these buyers so that they will have lower shipping costs and faster shipping. All European sellers should think good about how they can promote theirs and other local Etsy shops in there own country by advertising and giving interviews at magazines and newspapers. Difficult side of European buyers is that many do not have experience with buying online and do not own a credit card. By having that in mind it could be an option to have more options as paying method beside Paypal like bank drafts etc. Also MEN buyers are very low, and we are looking for ways to make them buy more for their ladies, hmmm even harder to get them!

7 comments:

  1. i found another option for asking your target market questions: trough your blog:
    http://paper-flower-girl.blogspot.com/
    now with blogger you can make these great polls. when every time you have two or three questions that you can change every month, you can find out about several aspects of your target market. off course you then have to make sure that people find your blog.

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  2. Thanks, Star, for writing this down for all of us!

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  3. Wonderful blogpost, Star! Thanks for taking the time to do so - highly appreciated! :)

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  4. star, thanks so much! You have made such a great job - it was really nice to refresh the memory :)

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  5. Star: Thanks for taking the time to pull all this together! I was not at the chat and reading this was quite helpfull.

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  6. Thanks star for writing this!
    Looking forward to our next chat :)

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  7. thanks Star for this resume of the chat, I'll try to post at the forum as soon as i can

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