Short answer: “everyone” is the most expensive answer you can give. If your business is for everyone, your prices have to please everyone, so you compete on being cheapest, and your posts have to interest everyone, so they say nothing. Fixing it takes about twenty minutes: think about one real customer, answer seven questions about them, and use what falls out.
This is the bit almost everybody skips. People pick a name, pay somebody for a logo, set up the accounts, and only much later work out who they were talking to. That order is backwards, and it is why so many businesses end up with a lovely logo and a quiet phone.
Why does “everyone” cost you money?
Because a business for everyone has nothing specific to say, and nothing specific to say is expensive in four separate ways.
Your price has to please everyone. The only price that works for everybody is the low one, so you end up competing on being cheapest against people who can afford to be cheaper than you.
Your posts have to interest everyone. So they get sanded down until they say nothing. This is the single most common reason a small business feed goes quiet, and it is worth understanding properly if that is happening to you: why your posts get no engagement, and what actually fixes it.
You cannot tell anybody where to find you. If your customers are everywhere, you have no reason to choose one street, one app or one local group over any other, so you spread yourself across all of them thinly.
You cannot answer the question. Somebody asks what you do and it takes thirty seconds, because you are describing a category rather than a person. Thirty seconds is too long. They have stopped listening.
None of this is a small problem, and it is not a beginner’s problem either. Markel Direct surveyed 501 UK tradespeople and small business owners in July 2026 and found 63% struggle to differentiate themselves. That is most of the market, and businesses of every age are in it.
What is a target market, really?
It is who you aim at. It is not who you are allowed to serve.
That distinction is the whole thing, and misunderstanding it is why people resist this exercise. Defining a target market does not mean turning anyone away. A gardener whose target market is people who have let a garden get away from them will still happily do a straightforward hedge. The definition changes what she says and where she says it. It does not change who she takes money from.
So the useful question is not “who could buy this”, which is nearly everybody and therefore useless. It is “who am I talking to when I write something”.
How do you work out who your business is for?
Seven questions, about twenty minutes. Do it with a pen rather than on a screen. It works better and you are more likely to finish.
1. Name one. Think of one real customer you have already served, or one you would love to serve. Use their actual name. Not a type of person, a person. Everything else falls apart if you skip this, because “women aged 30 to 50” cannot answer any of the questions below.
2. What was going on for them? What happened that week that sent them looking? Not “they wanted their garden doing”. What actually happened. The in-laws were coming. The house was going on the market. They had been meaning to for six months and something tipped it.
3. What did they nearly do instead? Everybody has an alternative. Doing nothing. Doing it themselves. Somewhere cheaper. Whatever you write here is what you are really competing with, and it usually is not the business down the road.
4. What did they say when it went well? Their words, not yours. Write it exactly as they said it, awkward phrasing and all. This is the most valuable line on the page, because their language will outperform anything you would have written about yourself.
5. What would they never pay for? The question everybody skips. It tells you where to stop, which saves you more money than any of the others.
6. Where were they before they found you? Be specific. A street. An app. A friend at the school gates. A search on their phone at eleven at night.
7. What can you say that the place down the road cannot? One sentence. If you cannot answer it yet, that is the most useful thing you will learn today, and it is fixable.
If you get stuck on the first one, use somebody who has not paid you yet: a neighbour, a friend of a friend, the person you had in mind when you first thought about doing this. The exercise still works. What it will not survive is an imaginary person invented to fit the answer you wanted.
What does it look like when somebody actually does this?
Here is a worked example. Ruth clears and maintains gardens. She had been calling herself a gardener and getting nowhere.
- Name one. Margaret, on the next road.
- What was going on. Her husband had done that garden for forty years. He died in the spring. By July she could not see the path.
- Nearly did instead. Nothing. She had put it off since April because she did not want a stranger looking at the state of it.
- What she said. “I didn’t want a big firm. I wanted somebody who wouldn’t make me feel daft about letting it go.”
- Would never pay for. A design. Decking. Anything that sounds like a project.
- Where she was before. Her daughter asked on a local Facebook group.
- What Ruth can say. She works on her own, she turns up herself every time, and she does not judge.
Ruth stopped saying “garden maintenance and landscaping, no job too small”. She started saying “I clear gardens that have got away from people, and I won’t make you feel bad about it”.
Same work. Same prices. A completely different response, because Margaret can recognise herself in the second sentence and cannot in the first.
Notice what Ruth did not do. She did not change her prices, buy a van or get a new logo. She changed one sentence, and she only knew which sentence because she had thought about one real person instead of the whole town.
What do you do with the answers?
Three things, all of which you can do this week.
Your next few posts are already written. Question 2 is a post. Question 3 is a post. Question 4 is the best post you will ever write, because it is a real person’s words about a real problem. Most people who cannot think what to post have not run out of ideas, they have run out of a specific person to talk to. If you want the general version of this, here are five things any business can always post.
Your price stops being a guess. Once you know what they would never pay for, you know what to stop offering. Once you know what they nearly did instead, you know what your price is actually being compared against. Usually that is not a competitor. It is doing nothing, which is free, and which you beat on outcome rather than on cost.
You know where to stand. Question 6 tells you where to spend your time. If the answer is a friend at the school gates, then word of mouth is your channel and adverts are a distraction. If it is a search on a phone at eleven at night, sort your local listing before anything else.
One warning. Do this once, then leave it alone for three months. The temptation is to keep refining the sheet instead of going out and finding customers. The sheet is not the work.
What if you narrow down and lose customers?
This is the real objection, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one.
You will lose some. Specifically, you will lose the ones who were price shopping and would have haggled, and the ones whose job you did not really want. What you gain is that the people who do come to you have already decided before they speak to you, which shortens every conversation and removes most of the negotiation.
There is also a version of this that goes wrong, so it is worth naming. Narrowing to a group too small to sustain you is a genuine mistake. The test is arithmetic rather than instinct: roughly how many of these people exist within the distance you are willing to travel, and how often would each of them need you? If the honest answer is a handful a year, widen it. If it is hundreds, you have not narrowed too far, you have just stopped being invisible.
And if you are in a sector where the customer base is genuinely large and the problem is standing out within it rather than finding it, that is a different exercise with the same starting point. The gym and studio version of this works the same way: one real member, not a demographic.
Then what?
Then you have to say it repeatedly, in public, for longer than feels reasonable, which is where most of this falls down. Knowing who your business is for makes the posts easier to write. It does not make them appear.
That part is a separate discipline, and an honest one to plan for: how to post consistently when you run the whole business. If what is holding you back is that your posts look thrown together next to everybody else’s, that has a fix too, and it does not involve hiring anyone: making your posts look professional without a designer.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a target market and a target audience? In practice, very little, and the distinction matters less than people selling marketing courses suggest. A target market usually means the group of customers your business is aimed at. A target audience usually means the people a specific piece of content is aimed at, which might be narrower. If you are a small business owner, answering the seven questions above gives you both.
How narrow should my target market be? Narrow enough to say something specific, wide enough to sustain you. The arithmetic test is the reliable one: how many of these people are within reach, and how often would each need you? A handful a year means widen it. Hundreds means you have not gone too far.
Do I have to turn customers away? No. Defining who you aim at is not a rule about who you serve. It changes what you say and where you say it, not who you take money from.
What if I have several very different types of customer? Do the exercise separately for each, then look at which one you would rather have more of. Most small businesses find one group is more profitable, more pleasant or more likely to recommend them, and that is the one worth aiming at first. You are not deleting the others.
I have not had any customers yet. Can I still do this? Yes, and it is more useful now than later. Use somebody real you would like to serve rather than somebody invented. A person you know slightly beats a made up persona every time, because you can check your answers against a real human rather than against your own assumptions.
How often should I redo it? Roughly every six months, or whenever something real changes: a new service, a new area, or a run of customers who do not look like the ones you expected. Not weekly. Rewriting the sheet is a very comfortable way of avoiding the harder job of telling people you exist.
Does SocialPostxr need me to have done this first? It helps, but no. SocialPostxr builds from your website, your photos and the way you already describe your business, so it works from what is there. The difference is that once you know who you are talking to, you will recognise a good post when you see one, and the ones you approve will sound like they were written for somebody in particular. You can see how it works or compare the plans.
SocialPostxr turns your business into finished posts, captions and visuals included, then schedules and publishes them for you. The free Starter plan is £0 with no card required, and includes unlimited scheduling plus 5 starter posts. Start free.
