What’s the best strategy for reaching your target market?
The best ways to find and reach your target audience.
One of the most important things any marketing group can do for an organization is to find your business or product’s target market. Sometimes, sweeping, broad marketing campaigns are great for brands with a very broad market without a regional specific audience and for brands looking to push awareness. But ultimately not every product is good for every customer – John Deere products might not get a lot of sales in urban areas with city-living condo owners. So being able to refine your target audience is one of the best ways improve your marketing, effectively reach your market, and drive more revenue.
Understanding the best way to market your business is crucial to being able to reach potential customers. It starts with research, and defining what sections of the consumer base you’re trying to communicate with. Doing target market analysis can help businesses understand not just who they think their customers are, but the customers who either are buying their products or who the research says will benefit most from them. This is a crucial step in getting the best understanding of your target customer.
There are several diverse ways to start doing the work to finding and communicating with your targeted customer base. Here are some of the top targeting marketing strategies.
Geographic Segmentation
This can be any kind of focused marketing that separates or focuses in on customers based on their geographical location – city, country, zip code. This kind of focused advertising comes up a lot on social media marketing, where marketers are only sending ads out to people who register as either living or currently being active (via GPS) in a certain place. One example of this kind of segmentation is done by restaurants – they know their product might not appeal to everyone, so they’ll just focus their advertising on their surrounding neighborhood.
Demographic Segmentation
Another type of segmentation strategy is demographic, which considers things such as age, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, languages spoken, average income, education level etc. You can use this kind of target market segmentation in several ways – either by targeting one part (a male clothing company marketing to anyone identifying as male on a social channel) or cross-targeting (males in Michigan, between 21 and 51, making 30k+a year).
Behavioral Segmentation
You can also do concentrated marketing based on actual customer behavior. Behavior can include anything from purchasing behavior of any products, like frequency of purchase, or spending behavior across all markets and industries. If you know that your product is a high-end, luxury item, you might want to target customers who you’ve identified as being affluent and buying luxury or high-end items. If it’s a piece of IT software, you can target businesses who are regularly purchasing software solutions.
Customer segmentation is a common and useful marketing strategy. Using target marketing strategies like these can help you understand your market at a very specific level and then use that analysis to make the best marketing decisions for your business or brand. Does your brand employ any target marketing strategies? Have they been effective in helping increase conversions or brand awareness?
