I write about many of these topics on my blog, but specialize in market segmentation and gathering target market information. So I want to share with you how to do a free target market analysis that takes only minutes.

Step 1: You Need Demographics To Perform Your Market Analysis

First you must identify the best potential customers for what you sell. Then you need to know five major demographics for your target market:

1. Age provides generation and life stage characteristics.

2. Gender provides marketing appeals that differ between men and women.

3. Education provides social class and lifestyle characteristics.

4. Occupation is the best predictor of social class.

5. National origin, or race, provides characteristics that differ by culture.

Now this information is sometimes difficult to locate, particularly if your business is Internet based. But I recently discovered a site that provides age and gender demographics by keywords. You’ll be surprised at how many marketing characteristics you can learn from just these two demographics.

So go to http://adlab.microsoft.com/Demographics-Prediction/DPUI.aspx. and get age and gender demographics for your major keywords, those that you’re building your site or blog around.

By doing a Google search for your target market, you’ll discover additional demographics to perform your market analysis. This isn’t necessary, but the more demographics you have, the more complete you target market analysis will be.

Step 2: You Need A Simple Process To Perform Your Market Analysis

Just having demographics for your target market doesn’t help you much unless you know characteristics for them. That’s why I developed my matrix market segmentation process for my students when I was still teaching at the University of Oklahoma. I knew my students wouldn’t use the process unless I made it easy.

So I developed matrices that contained the major characteristics by each demographic segment. For example, generations differ considerably in what they value, what they trust, how they want to live and work, their concerns, and their hopes. So I developed a matrix for each generation so students could just copy and paste into a table. When finished the table contains the major characteristics for a target market.

This worked well and I provide a free report on how to use this manual process when you subscribe to my blog.

Step 3: You Need A Way To Perform Your Market Analysis Easily and Quickly

After I retired from higher education and started my Internet business, I soon realized that business owners need an even quicker and easier way to use my process. So I paid a programmer $550 to automate it. Now the program does all the work for you.

But it’s a good idea to read the free report before getting your free target market analysis. Then you’ll understand what the program is doing and how to best use the results.

You just login to AutoMarketAnalysis.com and do the regular opt-in routine. When you’re returned to the site, you’ll select demographic options from your research in step 1, and click the submit button.

Because this site was created by the programmer, it’s not very pretty, but if you can overlook its looks, you’ll be amazed at the information it’ll provide.

You’ll immediately get characteristics that are shared across demographics, the best marketing appeals for your target market, and for some target markets, media preferences and buying behavior.

Step 4: After You Perform Your Market Analysis, Implement It.

When you’ve got your free target market analysis, you have to use the results in your marketing strategies and tactics. It will do you no good to perform your market analysis if you don’t use it.

But with your free target market analysis report, you’ll have all the information you need to select marketing appeals that your potential customers will relate to and be influenced by. So why wouldn’t you use it to improve sales and customer relationships.

Step 5: Gather The Other Information You Need To Perform Your Market Analysis

As stated earlier you’ll need additional information about your competitors, product, market environment, pricing, distribution, etc. To start you can go to my blog, click on “Site Map” in the top navigation and see categories with links to my posts on each.

I know you’ll find my posts helpful as you perform your market analysis.

Linda Morton writes on many aspects of marketing on her blog at http://StrategicMarketSegmentation.com/blog. But her specialty is market segmentation and target marketing.

She wrote a national column on her market segmentation process for ten years. To use her automated process, go to http://AutoMarketAnalysis.com.

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Small crazy personal reminiscence on Investment and a great tool I (and you should) use – ChartNexus charting software
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Crazy day at the Market! You want some?
Powerful Marketing ToolKit From Marketing Experiments