What is Target Marketing and Why is Targeting Important in Marketing

What is target marketing? Why is targeting in marketing so important? Identifying the right target audience can help you develop effective marketing strategies for your business. Here you’ll find a step-by-step approach to target advertising to a specific market segment.

Have you ever met one of those people that want everyone they meet to love them? This is why everything they say or do is so annoyingly generic or sometimes even contradictory. Worse yet, they never manage to grow some honest, deep friendships, based on love, trust, and understanding.

Why is this so?

Their problem lies in the fact that they don’t choose their friends according to some shared interests, preferences, and traits. Sometimes, building direct relationships with a smaller group of people is more important than being loved by everyone.

The same rule applies to the marketing world, where quality is still valued more than quantity.

To promote your business successfully, you need to reach out to the right people and provide them with a highly personalized user experience.

This is where target marketing comes to shine.

Table of Contents

What is Target Marketing?

Target marketing helps you divide a broad market into smaller, more relevant segments. Letting you define your target demographic based on their unique traits, it helps you focus on those people that are really interested in what you have to offer and who may benefit from your products.

For example, if your agency offers disability employment services, your target audience is either people with disabilities that want to find a job or employers wanting to hire a disabled person. So, instead of marketing to massive markets, you would simply focus on addressing those specific population segments and, in this way, put your services in front of the right people.

Why is Targeting Important in Marketing?

Customer segmentation is an essential piece of a huge puzzle called marketing. Both directly and indirectly, it influences your business decisions, branding, and customer experience.

Targeting allows you to do the following:

Understand what marketing strategies resonate with your target audience and use them to engage them.
Attract the right leads and turn them into loyal customers.
Rise above those competitors that aren’t communicating their unique selling directly, to the right audiences.
Build trust and boost customer loyalty. Once people start seeing you as an advocate for their specific needs, they will stay loyal to your brand.
Tailor your products and services to your target audiences’ expectations effectively.
Create a solid marketing strategy and keep your branding efforts on track.

Start by Building a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is an imaginary character that represents your perfect customer.

It’s not something created randomly. Instead, it is a result of an extensive market research, based on your target audience’s characteristics, habits, problems, and values.

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To create your buyer persona, you need to ask yourself lots of questions about their:

Demographics- their age, gender, education, marital status, religion, etc.
Socioeconomics- educational attainment, occupation, household income.
Brand affinity- how your customers engage with products similar to yours.
Psychographics- their emotions and personality.
Benefits sought- how your customers can benefit from choosing your business.
Sources of influence- what channels affect their shopping decisions.

Read: Developing a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Blog

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Conduct both Primary and Secondary Research

Like we’ve already mentioned above, to create your buyer persona, you need to use up-to-date and relevant data. This is why you need to perform a comprehensive customer research. Here is how you can do so:

Set up online surveys.
Interview your customers.
Invest in a social media monitoring tool and listen to your customers’ discussions on social networks.
Use web analytics to track your data. Tools like Google Trends, Alexa, and Ahrefs can help you here.
Talk to your sales team to learn more about your customers’ buying habits.

You should also use the resources someone has already done before. This could be whitepapers and case studies published recently that cover the topics relevant to you.

Analyze your Competitors

Personalizing your marketing efforts also means doing a solid competitive analysis. Monitoring your rivals’ strategies helps you see what groups of people they target, what marketing techniques they use to engage those people, and how effective their strategies are.

Based on what you already learned about your perfect buyer, ask yourself the following questions about your competitors:

What is their market positioning? You need to know what customers actually buy from them.
What are their customers’ hobbies, preferences, needs, and problems? These are all people that may be interested in your brand, so you need to understand them.
How do they optimize their pricing? Are their customers willing to pay for their products or services? What pricing strategies would you use to stay competitive?
What are people saying about them on social networks? How good or bad their business’ reviews on social networks and business review sites are? Find their major weaknesses and turn them to your advantage. You should avoid the mistakes they make and replicate their effective strategies to persuade your shared audience to choose your brand over theirs.

Read: How to outrank your competitors using SEMrush?

How to Market to your Target Audience?

Now that you’ve done your customer segmentation and created your ideal buyer persona, you need to start making smart, data-backed decisions. Here are a few ideas on how to implement targeting into your marketing strategies.

Create targeted content that is relevant to your users. Make sure it answers all their questions, helps them solve problems, and gives them actual tips, based on solid facts and stats. Experiment with the forms of content (articles, guides, case studies, infographics, podcasts, videos, etc.) until you find those that work well for you.
Define your brand voice to make yourself recognizable. When making these decisions, keep in mind your brand’s ‘personality’, as well as your customers’ communicational patterns. It’s not the same talking to Millennials and Baby Boomers, right?
On social networks, use targeted Facebook posts and hashtags your target audience uses to make your brand more visible.
Generate brand buzz by creating new and fresh content using micro-influencers and social media creators. It will help you appeal to your target audience with authentic and relevant content and prevent ad fatigue as content creation opportunities will be endless. You can use various tools, like trend.io, to find influencers and creators who care about your brand or product.
Make your email marketing highly personalized. Tell your customers that you remember them buying from you. Offer those products related to their previous If they’ve abandoned your shopping cart, sending an email reminding them of what they’ve left behind may inspire them to complete their purchase.
Optimize your site to deliver a targeted user experience. Start by improving your navigation. This means having a simple menu, with clear labels, catchy and dynamic CTAs, and a predictive search box. Use internal linking to guide your customers to the pages and content they like. Also, add the “Related Products,” “Recently Viewed” or “Content you May also be Interested in” options to customize their buying journey.

Over to You

Personalization is the backbone of your business promotion. It allows you to boost your brand awareness, position yourself as a leader in your niche and, above all, build strong relationships with your customers.

And, it has grown far beyond addressing your customers using their personal names. With the help of target marketing, you can now collect your customer data effectively and give them exactly what they expect from you.

Target Advertising to a Specific Market Segment 101