SaaS Target Market: The Definitive Guide
As a SaaS product owner, startup founder or someone promoting software. Understanding your target market and the difference between your target audience is crucial to increasing user adoption and conversion rate, reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value.
It’s easy to define your target market at a high level, but targeting the wrong audience will lead to failure.
Finding your perfect target audience is essential to success.
Note the two different terms used above:
- Target Market: This is the larger group of people or industries that will buy your product or service.
- Target Audience: This is the smaller group of people, teams or individuals who will actually purchase or use your product or service.
Software products and services are not a one-size-fits-all approach; what works for one market doesn’t mean it will work for another.
Identify your market
Before you jump into any planning or strategy and map out your target market, audience or building persona.
First, you need to ask yourself:
- Is the product or service B2B
- Is the product or service B2C
- Are you competing in a Blue Ocean
- Are you competing in a Red Ocean
You need to ask those questions and answer them in detail because this will give you a defined target market and audience you can refine.
It’s easy to start talking about numbers and discussing Psychographic or Demographics, but you need to understand where your product fits in the existing market, your user, the decision-makers, the blockers, the influencers and how each one of them can affect the purchasing decisions of a product or service.
Refining your niche
Once you have identified your product and the target market, you can start refining your niche or target audience.
If you haven’t already done this, downloading our free workbook is highly recommended here.
5 questions you should ask to refine your niche:
- Define what type of audience you want.
- Who are the influencers in this space?
- What is the best way for them to find out about it?
- How can they get in touch with you?
- Where else could you be found online?
Buyer Persona (Avatar) Questions
The last phase is to build out the different buyer persona you want to target. These are the people, the person, the individuals in your niche. These can be the makers, the shakers, the deal breakers and the influencers who are involved in the purchasing decision.
- What are their problems?
- What are their questions?
- What are their roadblocks?
- What are the results they want?
- Who influences the decisions?