Marketing effectiveness is what every business and organization are looking to achieve, the road to achieving marketing effectiveness and an impressive marketing ROI involves a strategic approach and target marketing is a crucial ingredient in this approach. Target marketing is a focused marketing approach that emphasis on the identification of the “perfect” customer or market and directing the efforts towards that target market. Target marketing is the key to effective marketing when the market is clearly defined there are higher chances of marketing success compared to an approach where a business tries to sell to everyone. Marketing has evolved over the years trying to adapt to the strategies that work best, and this is how target marketing came to be, it is a refinement of strategies over the years. This article will discuss targeted marketing and what you need to know.
What is target marketing and what are its advantages?
Targeted marketing is an advertising strategy that involves identification of the target market (customers who have the best chance of being interested in your offer), identifying their needs and offering products and services that satisfy their needs.
Target marketing is an integral part of the marketing mix; effective target marketing provides the following benefits to the business or organization.
– Efficient use of time and resources. The marketing efforts are focused on the right market and hence the resources and time invested have high chances to show positive returns. In cases where the business has no target market, it is almost impossible to achieve market effectiveness because marketing resources are directed even to markets that are not interested.
– Marketing effectiveness.
Target marketing is the holy grail to marketing effectiveness; it gives direction to the entire marketing strategy.
– Facilitates market intelligence.
When the market to be served is defined it is easy to gather information in that market as the needs are similar and hence will allow the business or organization to make informed decisions.
– Defeating the opposition in the selected market.
As a general rule of thumb, The initiative of marketing is to identify the customer’s needs and offer solutions to those needs better than the competitors. Target marketing helps the business become competitive in every way by providing the required information and offering a specific market to serve.
There are three factors that are used when defining a target market.
1. Demographics
2. Location
3. Psycho-graphics
These factors help the marketers identify the ideal or the perfect customer depending on the demographic factors like age, gender, ethnicity, income, etc. The geographical location is also an important factor to consider as some locations may be interested in products and service while others are not, and the reasons are attributed to their locations. Psychographic factors include personality, lifestyle, values, etc.the a; these factors will also be crucial in determining the perfect customer as products and services may be appealing to a certain group of people living a certain kind of lifestyle and not any other group.
Steps to target marketing
– Define your customer
The first question a marketer will ask you when developing your product or selling your products is to “define your perfect customer”. Who are targeting what is the age, location, gender, income, lifestyle of your perfect customer, this step will help you in identifying who is interested in your products and services. Identify the need that is not being satisfied or in inadequately satisfied, think of how to solve this problem effectively and better than the other players. The ideal customer may have various characteristics, and these will help you classify and put your target customers into groups (segments).
– Conduct market research
Marketing decisions are conducted off of the collected customer information.. When you have defined your perfect customer it is time to do a research and eliminate the assumptions made in step one with actual data. Conducting a research will help the marketer understand what the customer needs and direct all the efforts toward offering the solution in the most effective way.
– Choose the markets to target
Based on the data you have collected from the customers it is possible to identify the target audience. The target customer may be in different markets and hence choose the markets to target; it is possible to target more than one market, but the decision is highly determined by marketing ROI.
Target marketing will continue to an effective marketing approach whether the marketing campaign is online (digital marketing) or offline, it gives the general marketing direction to take to achieve effective marketing.