Target Marketing, also known as market segmentation, involves breaking a market into segments and then concentrating your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments.
The beauty of target marketing is that it makes the promotion, pricing, and distribution of the products and/or services simpler, directed, and more cost-effective. Target marketing provides a clear direction to all of the marketing activities.
Identifying the target market is an essential step in the development of products, services, and the marketing efforts used to promote them.
In other words, you need to create products, services, and marketing campaigns for a specific, well-defined group of people.
The Power of Targeting
If you know how to create marketing messages that truly relate to your target audience, you will achieve higher conversion rates, and build a more powerful brand.
Targeted advertisem*nts are, on average, almost twice as effective as non-targeted ads.
With a well-defined target audience, every detail of a marketing campaign can be perfectly tailored to appeal to customers’ interests, emotions, and views.This will result in satisfied customers and positive feedback.
Defining Your Target Market
Step 1: Identify the Key Benefit that Your Business Provides
Find what are the outcomes that your business provides for its customers.
Your business should be able to answer these questions clearly:
What problem do you solve?
What need do you meet?
And what desire do you fulfil?
Step 2: Profile Your Target Market
You need to narrow down the market segment you plan to target by being as specific as possible, using the following categories:
Geographic: location, population, size, climate
Demographic: age, gender, family status, occupation, income
Psychographic & Sociographic: social class, lifestyle, values, interests
Behavioural: product benefits, frequency of use or brand loyalty
Once you have done this, you should be able to paint a picture of your customer persona.
Step 3: Stay Objective
This is perhaps the most difficult part of the process.
It can be extremely difficult to avoid assumptions. Many people unintentionally search for, recall, and interpret information in a way that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses.This is calledconfirmation bias, and if you are not careful, it could ruin your business.
According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail not due to a lack of funding, but due to a lack of market need. They fail because the entrepreneurs behind them are so blindly passionate about their product or service, they forget to validate whether or not there’s a true need for it in the marketplace.
The other mistake businesses make is to conduct plenty of research, but no real testing.
Step 4: Consider niche markets
Today we live in the world of niche. The Internet's algorithm is fantastic at delivering personalised products and services, cutting out many of the distribution challenges that previously existed.
These factors mean that it is a more effective strategy to be a big fish in a small pond, rather than the other way round. It will be easier to build your reputation and gain referrals. You will also find you get more from your marketing endeavours.
With what you already know, start to segment your market.
Step 5: Evaluate your competition
Knowing your competitors is vital so you must look at the market to see what else is available. Then you must be able to answer this question:
Why am I uniquely placed to solve the problem?
If you are unable to answer the question, you may have the wrong target market or the wrong offering. In this case, more work will need to be done before you start targeting your potential customers.
