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A few weeks ago, my team led a session at our annual conference where we shared our go-to-market strategies. Among hundreds of other sessions, we wanted ours to stand out and add significant value. So, I asked the team to give away some go-to-market goodies—particularly some of the product templates we use when taking new products to market.

One of those documents was the user persona template we use to define a new product's target market.

To complete a user persona template, we employ key strategies in our market research to define a highly addressable target market for each product. I'm going to share those strategies with you.

Is it "target market" or "target markets"—singular or plural?

Notice that I'm referring to the target market for our new products. Not target markets. It's singular, not plural.

Any new product we launch is designed for one target market. Not multiple.

That's not to say we don't attack various markets. We do. But only over time, and we don't expand into new markets until we've dialed in the first target market.

Different target market approaches

There are a few ways to think about the depth of the target market you plan to attack.

Mass markets are when your product is intended to serve anyone and everyone. In most cases, new products won't be able to satisfy the full range of customers in a mass market out of the gate, because reaching feature parity with existing products is challenging.

Differentiated markets allow products to cater to the needs of specific target markets. Attacking differentiated markets has become the standard playbook for most new products. We see this with products that are very niche-focused. Some even deliberately choose to attack micro-markets—for example, markets based on a particular geography or subset of a demographic.

At the company I work for, we serve thousands of financial institutions. It's unlikely that any new product we release to the market will satisfy them all (i.e., make mass markets happy). But we don't drill down so far as to attack niche or micro markets. Instead, we focus on differentiated markets.

Ways to research target markets

The more specific your target market, the more important it is to understand it at an intimate level. The more intimate, the better. For example, taking beauty products to market means knowing the exact age, weight, height, skin color, etc. of that product's average customer. This allows you to design the product and its go-to-market strategies to attract that market.

Market research comes in all kinds of forms. Depending on various factors, some research methods will work for you, while others won't.

• Surveys: I've found surveys return interesting data points, but that's about it. Surveys provide limited findings because they're often delivered digitally. You don't get to see the interviewees' body language and other non-verbal cues. Still, they work well when you want to get feedback from a large set of your target market.

• Focus groups: You don't have to leverage focus groups in the standard, marketing way. My company uses different advisory boards, structured per product group, which act like focus groups. We're very selective about the customers invited to these advisory groups because the value of any focus group lies in its participants. If you're considering an advisory board, think hard about the cadence and delivery of those sessions. Depending on your industry and products, monthly could be too often, but annually could be not enough. I see quarterly as a good standard option.

• Competitor research: Some believe you should ignore what your competitors are doing. I don't. But I also don't believe you should put too much weight on their actions. After all, what if they aren't executing well? Still, I like to keep an eye on what competitors are doing. Sometimes they'll lead you towards trends occurring in the marketplace. To keep track of competitors, I use a mix of third-party analyst firms, intel from customers, and my favorite—intel from our sales team.

• On-site visits: My favorite way to do market research is by going to a customer's place of business and watching them interact with our products. There's a science to these visits. Some challenges that can arise include not getting access to the right people and customers being hesitant to provide in-depth, honest feedback face-to-face. When I'm on-site, I'm not looking for their most candid feedback or what they're saying. I focus on what they're doing and their body language. I watch for moments of hesitation when you can tell they want to say more but don't. To get their most candid feedback, I use a post-visit, anonymous feedback form.

• Customer forums and reviews: There are always customers who are more than willing to be vocal about either loving or hating a product. To learn those types of inputs, I love to scroll through forums. Reddit is a great place for this. People on Reddit are often more than willing to be vocal about products. I put less trust in review sites because some companies have a habit of gamifying those. For example, companies will sometimes offer discounts on future services for reviews. But forum sites like Reddit and others don't have that challenge.

• Social media: As with any type of research, you can't always believe what you read. But I find social media platforms such as X/Twitter to have good intel. I've personally had not-so-nice things to say about the products I use and I've posted those on Twitter. For example, this newsletter was originally on Substack. I never saw myself leaving there until I had an issue where customer support has still, to this day, not responded to ten-plus inquiries.

Other things to define with target market research

Many product managers focus on what their target market research tells them they should be doing. If my competitor is doing this, then I should do this or that.

My favorite part of market research is not just the opportunities it uncovers.

What I really like are the risks uncovered.

Target market research done well isn't just about what you should do. It should also be about what you shouldn't do.

Reflect back on my Substack example above. If you saw multiple social media posts from people complaining about customer support response times, you'd have learned that a response time over a certain timeframe is not acceptable to most customers. Accordingly, you could work to establish your own response time that's within a market-acceptable range.

If you heard during a customer on-site visit that a competitor's pricing framework is confusing, you'd know there's a risk in repeating the same mistake.

Don't simply perform market research with the idea of figuring out how to win. Sometimes it's about learning how not to lose.

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