How to Find and Market to your ideal clients
To ace target marketing you’ll need to have a proper strategy and plan in place. This is what targeting your audience is about. In this way, you’ll be able to market your brand and increase your ROI.
We’re excited to talk to you about target marketing and target segmentation. While they may sound like the same concept, they’re actually quite different. However, together they make targeting your market more successful.
Why use Target Marketing?
The answer is simple: you don’t want to waste money.
Think about traditional marketing for a moment. If you place an advert for baby products in a car magazine, chances are you won’t get any increase in sales. That same advert in a mommy mag will undoubtedly be seen by more of your ideal client: mothers to young babies.
With digital marketing, things become a bit easier. That’s because the power of Facebook’s algorithm allows us as digital marketers to very precisely target the exact type of person you want to show your advert to.
What is Target Marketing?
When you consider target marketing, it refers to the fact that you’ll be aiming or targeting your ads to a group of people to which you’ll have your message broadcasted to. This group is the consumers or the people who will most likely be considering your products for sale and your services.
How does it help your marketing efforts?
To know who your target market is, you need to consider what these potential customers are looking for and whether you supply them with a solution.
For instance, are you targeting car owners looking to keep their car in excellent condition? In that case, will your product or service help the car owners to be able to maintain their car?
After assessing who your target audience is, the next step is to give them solutions to their problems.
What is Market Segmentation?
You need market segmentation to help you discover who your true target audience is. Segmentation is the name given to the process of dividing your target market into what you could think of as “sections” or “divisions.”
Let’s take a look at two important segments: geographic and psychographic.
1. What is demographic segmentation?
Demographic segmentation scrutinizes various factors when it comes to targeting a certain audience. This close scrutiny will help a business owner to be able to customise their products and services. In doing so, a business owner can offer a tailored service or product to their customers.
Some aspects to consider in demographic segmentation may include but is not limited to the following:
Geographical areas
This takes in to account the areas are you most likely to find your target market. For local businesses, it might be a 15km radius around your business premises. For international businesses, you have to consider the countries you do business in depending on your ability to produce and ship the product.
Behaviour
Demographic segmentation also focuses on your audience’s behaviour. Are they sporty, bookish, socialisers, parents, entrepreneurs or charitable.
Education
Consider every option as it relates to your target market’s likely level of education. There is a big difference between experienced, qualified professionals compared to students fresh out of college or university.
Income levels
To target your audience, you will also be able to access your customers based on their income level. The analytics used to determine this may show how much your target market is prepared to spend and what they usually spend on products.
You might not be able to directly target people in a specific income bracket, but with some creativity you can get pretty close.
Your high net worth individuals might be interested in luxury brands, exotic travel locations, golf clubs and spas. These are things you can use to target this group of people.
Age
What age group are you catering to? As mentioned before, are you catering to the older generation, is your target audience for senior health care, or are you catering to parents with young children?
The age group will have a bearing on the ad copy (words) and images you select.
Gender
Despite the cry for equality, the fact remains that your target market’s gender plays a pivotal role in how you structure your ad campaign. Just like age, the gender of your audience will influence the tone of the content produced throughout your marketing efforts.
Advantages of demographic segmentation
Demographic segmentation makes it simpler to identify the audience by the main categories they would fall in. This narrows down marketing efforts greatly.
Disadvantages of demographic segmentation
Data analysis may lump everyone in the same category assuming that everyone thinks and prefers the same things. This generalisation can throw off the target aim.
Understanding target marketing with regards to geographic and psychographic segmentation
Market segmentation involves the points we’ve highlighted above but can also be further divided into geographical and psychographic segmentation.
Those are intricate terms especially if you’re not familiar with marketing. You need not worry because we’ll explain it in this post.
2. What is Geographic segmentation?
The simplest way to understand geographic segmentation is to take the name into consideration. Geographic relates to the areas and possible marketing areas or regions for that matter.
Small and medium-sized businesses can divide the areas that they service into various locations this can include catering for:
- Specific provinces (all of them or just the one in which the business main offices is located)
- International locations expanding brick and mortar stores or using an online shop
- Or just local cities close by
Advantages of geographic segmentation
There are many advantages to geographic segmentation these include but are also not limited to the following:
Better reach
Business owners can reach their market whether local or international. With better reach means that you can precisely cater to the needs of your market based on their region too.
SME’s can cater to their budgets
When it comes to running a small or medium business, it’s not always easy to reach a market when there is too much distance between them. This will require all types of costs including logistics, expanded advertising, and lots more.
With geographic segmentation, a small business owner can focus on their local market and grow and do well here before expanding.
Easier to understand
To understand and work out the geographical areas involved it takes less effort and analysis compared to psychographic segmentation.
Disadvantages of geographic segmentation
Not everyone is able to use distance to their advantage. Even if you had potential customers in other provinces, it doesn’t mean that you can reach them on a limited budget.
3. What is Psychographic segmentation?
Psychographic segmentation focuses closely on the lifestyle of the target audience.
As mentioned before, if you are targeting high net worth individuals, you will target people expressing an interest in high net worth items and activities.
A good example of this may include a luxury yacht importing company such as Boating World, or Chinese-owned British yacht manufacturer Sunseeker. These companies may have a wealthier target audience.
You can consider the same when it comes to luxury clothing designer brands such as Prada or Louis Vuitton. These companies’ target celebrities and extremely wealthy individuals.
Wealth is one of the focuses of psychographic segmentation but it isn’t the only factor.
This method of segmentation also addresses things such as the values and beliefs of the audience or market being targeted.
Advantages of psychographic segmentation
Psychographic segmentation helps business owners understand their customer’s on a deeper level. In essence, it helps to understand traits about their customers that are not verbally spoken.
Disadvantages of psychographic segmentation
Your target audience must take part in a psychographic survey to identify them better. The psychographic survey will assess the values, lifestyles, attitudes and even the goals of people.
Examples of this type of survey questions may be similar to the following:
- “How do you feel about hybrid cars for the future of the motoring industry?”
- “Should countries be more liberal towards natural herbs like cannabis?”
- “Do you recycle?”
- “Have you ever donated to charity?”
Target marketing helps you find the right person to market to.
Taping into the power of social media for your target marketing needs
As a business owner, your marketing segmentation strategies can greatly benefit from the use of social media.
Social media makes reaching your target audience even easier because of the vast amounts of information these platforms collect on us. Today you’ll rarely find someone without access to a mobile phone or tablet for that matter. Cell phones are even more accessible than computers.
Every like, comment and share is stored and used to create a picture of the type of person you are. This makes for efficient targeting on Facebook and Instagram.
With a large percentage of people using their phones to check their social media networks, you can be certain that this is a good way to reach your market.
The takeaway of target marketing
Target Marketing is vital because it improves ad experience for the end-user and also keeps your marketing budget in check.
But there’s more to it than just understanding the definitions of the marketing terms we explained above.
The best way to create your ideal customer is to imagine them as a real person.
Where do they hang out? What do they do for a living? Are there certain things they do for fun or exercise? Having a list of your ideal client’s characteristics makes it easier to create ads for them and target them when placing your ads.
It’s important to remember that your customer is a real person.
So while it’s useful to use general characteristics to find them on social media, at the end of the day you need to make your message personal and deliver on your promises.
To truly succeed in marketing, you must add value to the lives of your potential customers.
It’s also important to remember that marketing takes time and consistency to achieve success.
Do you use target marketing and marketing segmentation when advertising your business?
Are you obsessed with Social Media Marketing?
Follow us on social media for FREE digital marketing advice to take your marketing to the next level.
