Shadowing Practice: How To Identify Target Market | Target Market Examples - Learn English Speaking with Video

If you fail to properly identify your target market, then none of your marketing will work.

Period.

Not your ads, not your content, not your website, not your social media, nothing.

It'll all just fail miserably.

And I don't want that for you.

Which is why in this episode, I'm going to be breaking down exactly how to identify your target market

and give you some real-life examples

so you can use them as reference in your business so you never make this mistake again.

Let's get to it.

Hey there, my name is Adam Erhardt, marketing strategist and welcome to The Marketing Show, where we help you grow your business and generate more leads, customers, and sales by making way better marketing.

So if you're interested in learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks, and tactics, well, you may want to consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell so you never miss a future episode.

Alright, let's talk about ideal target market

and specifically how to identify your ideal target market because

if you get this piece wrong then like I alluded to

before well pretty much nothing else is going to work

because this is the core foundational and key element that all of the rest of your marketing is built on.

So it's that important which is why I'm glad you're here now watching this here

so allow me to break down the exact steps

so you make sure that you always clearly identify and isolate

and then attract and really find them where they are online

and offline so you can put your message directly in front of them in the most clear

and concise and compelling way possible to get more leads and sales.

Alright, so it all starts with step number one, which is having an ideal customer avatar.

Now, if you've never heard of this before, what an ideal customer avatar is, is a kind of a composite or a fictional representation,

or it could even be built off a real customer that you've had in the past.

But essentially, this person or this sort of fictional representation makes up your most perfect and ideal customer.

The kind of customers that you absolutely love doing business with and the ones that love you back.

The ones that pay you for the value you provide.

They are not whiners.

They don't complain.

They don't make your life miserable.

Essentially, you want more of these people.

Well, in order to get more of these people, you first need to really clearly articulate what all these people have in common.

And I'm going to give you a few frameworks in just a minute, so stick with me.

But essentially, what we want to do is we want to build out three main core principles of your ideal customer avatar,

including their demographic details like what is their age, their gender, income, occupation, job title, things like that.

Their geographic details like what city or state or province

or country or basically where they live and then their psychographic details like their attitudes, their interests, their beliefs, their organizations or affiliations,

maybe even their political or religious views.

All of these things that sort of make up the head stuff of your ideal customers.

You also really want to dive deep into what I call their miracles and their miseries.

Their miracles being all of their wants and their dreams

and their aspirations and their goals and then their miseries being all their pains

and their frustrations and their fears and their nightmares.

All the things that keep them up laying awake at night when they can't fall back asleep.

The better that you understand them and are able to articulate their demographic, geographic and psychographic details and the better that you really understand their miracles

and their miseries and how all these play together well the better

that you're gonna be able to form this ideal customer avatar

which is gonna make all of the rest of the steps that much easier.

Now like I said before there are some frameworks here

that I want to share with you So let's dive into the first one now.

Now the first way to really identify an ideal target market

that you want to go after is to look at a framework called the PVP framework which basically stands for personal fulfillment,

value to market and profitability So let me break down each one of those for you now.

The first P is personal fulfillment.

And this is essentially just how much do you enjoy working with this type of market?

Do they share similar values?

Do you enjoy helping them?

Do they get value from you helping out?

Do you have a good relationship?

Do you enjoy talking with them?

Do you have shared interests?

That type of thing.

See, it's probably no surprise that you're going to be able to do a lot better

and you're going to be able to attract a lot higher quality customer

and someone that you actually enjoy working with

if you actually enjoy working with them and you've got similar characteristics

or commonalities or you're able to empathize with them and really kind of get on the same page.

The next letter is V and this is all about value to market or value to marketplace.

Basically is the product or the service or the offer

that you're putting out there of a high perceived value to the customer that you're trying to serve.

Basically if you've got something that's going to be really valuable to a certain segment of people, you're going to probably want to serve them rather than a

different segment of people who may have no interest at all in what you're trying to sell.

A good example here, and basically just because I've got one on the wall, would be say guitar strings.

Now, if you're trying to sell guitar strings to me, I'm going to be interested and it's going to provide a lot of value to me

because I'm going to need them for my guitar.

But if you try to sell them to some of my friends who don't play guitar, there's going to be pretty much no value at all.

Unless, of course, they're nice and just want to buy me some strings.

All right, moving right along to the third letter, which is P, and this is all about profitability.

This one is kind of obvious and goes without saying, but hey, let's say it anyways.

Basically, profitability is how profitable are these customers to your business?

Basically, when you take a look at all the different available markets that you could pursue, some of which are going to be in a better position to spend a whole lot more money than other people,

meaning you can probably provide a much higher quality service or product to them.

As a real rough example, let's just look at demographic details like age range.

Well, it's probably not surprising that someone who's, say, still in college or maybe who's retired

and trying to watch what they've trying to spend

and trying to save and basically on two complete opposite ends of the spectrum, they might have less discretionary or disposable income than, say, someone right in the middle of the spectrum who's in their prime working years

and making income and actively out in the workforce.

It doesn't mean that you don't go after students or retirees.

It just means that of those subsets, if we're looking at things strictly demographically, it's pretty obvious to see which subset is going to have, in general, more money to spend.

Alright, so that's the PVP framework and it's very important to keep in mind

and when you start to stack that on top of your ideal customer avatar framework, looking at demographic, geographic, and psychographic details, your target market starts to become really crystallized

and starts to become a whole lot easier to identify so you can go out there and locate them later.

But before we do that, there's another framework that I want to share with you

that can help add even more bang to your marketing buck and that's the RFM framework.

The RFM framework basically looks at recency, frequency, and monetary.

And it's kinda similar, but it's also kinda different.

So let's dive into it now.

Basically, what this framework helps you do is determine which subset

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or which cohort or which area of your market is going to be the most valuable to you moving forward.

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The R stands for recency.

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Now, essentially, the more recently that someone has bought or done business with you or a competitor

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or basically any kind of similar product, well, the more valuable they're going to be.

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After all, if they've just bought something, the odds of them buying something similar or in a similar market

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or whatever is basically a lot higher than someone who's never bought it before or hasn't bought in months or even years.

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The next letter is F, and it's all about frequency.

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Basically, if someone buys stuff a lot, it's probably no surprise

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that they're going to be a better customer who's going to be more likely to buy a whole lot more.

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I don't think there's too much to say on that one.

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And then the M, of course, is monetary.

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And this is very similar to the profitability that we talked about in the PVP framework.

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But basically, the monetary is, well, how much did they spend?

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And you can see if you've got a customer that's recently bought, they buy frequently, and they spend a large amount, these are the kind of people you want to go after.

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All right, so now that I've broken down the frameworks for you, the next step is to go out there and try to find these people.

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How do you do that?

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How do you identify that ideal target market who's going to love you

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and love what you do and pay you for the value you provide?

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Well, if you've already got a business and you've got some sales under your belt, you're in a great position here because the very first thing you're gonna want to do is analyze your current customers.

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Essentially, we're gonna want to take a look at the 80-20 distribution or the Pareto principle.

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And basically, we want to look for the top 20% of your customers, which probably, statistically speaking, are gonna be responsible for around 80% of your revenue, depending on your business.

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Well, when you analyze this top 20% of customers, you're going to want to look for all of the frameworks that I just talked about.

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You're gonna want to look for similarities and commonalities in the demographic details

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and geographic and psychographic details You're gonna want to look at personal fulfillment

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and value to the market and the profitability

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And of course RFM being recency frequency and monetary And

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when you lay all these out and you look at

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that top 20% of customers You should start to see some trends

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and some commonalities between your best customers once you do

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that well you pretty much have an ideal target market

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that you've identified and some relatively sort of similar characteristics between them

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so you can use this to go out and find more of them.

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Now if you don't have a business or

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if you're just launching a new product or a new service

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or a new offer and you don't have a proven track record of sales basically behind you

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that you can mine for data well you're gonna be in a bit of a different position

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but still all of the concepts I shared with you still apply.

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The alternative however to mining the data

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that you already have is going out there and getting as much new data as possible and this means talking to people.

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Basically that's it.

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You want to have a conversation, you want to learn about them, you want to present your product or your service, you want to ask them questions, you want to see what their pains are,

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you want to see what solutions they're looking for

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and you want to make sure that you're basically designing your product

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and service more to fit the needs of an ideal customer avatar than the other way around.

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Let me elaborate on that in just a second.

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You see one of the biggest mistakes you can make in

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business is to come up Come up with a business

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or a product or a service first

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And then try to fit it into some area of the market and basically jam it in there.

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Rarely is it gonna fit perfectly.

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Some adaptations and basically tweaks are gonna need to be made.

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Better solution is to first at least even roughly identify some target market, some basic sort of generalization based on some of the criteria

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that we've already talked about and then try to design your product

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or your service or at least tailor it to them rather than the other way around.

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Way more profitable, way more fun.

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All right, so now that I've got all of that covered, we've laid everything out on the table, let me give you a couple examples, both in the B2C industry,

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business to consumer, and the B2B industry, the business to business.

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Let's say that you're in the B2C space and you're selling direct from your business to consumers and you're selling, say, a weight loss supplement.

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Well, let's say also that you've got two different target markets that you could pursue.

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We'll call these cohorts.

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And essentially what we want to do is we want to clearly identify a target market

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or an avatar for each one of these cohorts

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So we can make sure

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that we're positioning our marketing accordingly Cohort one could be let's say men ages 18 to 25 They live in the US,

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they like CrossFit and Muay Thai and maybe MMA and bodybuilding

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So you could then use this information to go out there and create a campaign that's targeting them Speaking their specific language, being on platforms that they're going to be active and present on

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and essentially making sure that you're really dialing in your marketing just to focus on them.

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Another cohort you could try would be, say, new moms who are between the ages of, say, 25 and 35, also live in the U.S., who might enjoy watching shows like The Biggest Loser,

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have probably tried different diets before, including keto or Atkins or paleo or whatever,

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and basically are looking for that next solution or that next fix to help them get where they're trying to go.

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Again, by clearly dialing in this cohort and this ideal target market, you can really start to structure your marketing and your messaging

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and making sure you're ending up in the right places to

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get directly in front of these people with your message and with your product.

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Alright, and now a B2B or business to business example.

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Let's say that you're selling coaching or consulting services and you're helping health-based practitioners grow their businesses.

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Well, for starters, you'd probably want to set some kind of parameters around the business.

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Maybe they're doing a million a year in revenue or above.

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Also, because you're servicing health-based practitioners, you'd want to really ideally articulate kind of what kind of health-based practitioners.

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Are we talking about chiropractors or physiotherapists or massage therapists or whatever?

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When it comes to demographics, we could be looking at all sorts of different age ranges, but let's say for this one between the ages of 35 and 55.

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Also, for psychographic details and who they follow, what kind of books they read, well, let's say that they enjoy watching TED Talks, they follow Tony Robbins, and they attend one to two seminars each year.

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Again, these are fictional representations, but they're very important because what they allow you to do is really get into the mind

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and into the shoes of your ideal target market, that person that you're really trying to serve.

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And the better that you're able to understand what they're going through and where they're coming from, well, the better your marketing is going to be.

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All right, the next thing you're going to want to do is make

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sure to check out the video right here on the six pillars of marketing strategy, which is going to help ensure that you never create bad marketing again.

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So check that out now.

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Thanks so much for watching, and I'll catch you next time on The Marketing Show.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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