Pick Your Lane
The Power of Target Marketing
Imagine if every marketing dollar you spent not only helped drive significant sales but provided the feedback you need to drive into your market deeper. Properly targeting a viable market facilitates focus, succinct messaging and added value to create customers who are raving fans.
Let’s look at a residential roofing contracting firm serving a larger metro area. Traditionally, they might advertise on the radio, work a home show booth and they might even run an ad in a local magazine or newspaper. These methods are not targeted and reach a broad audience, which is more of a “shotgun” approach. By implementing a targeted approach, the contracting firm might identify their ideal customer as an established, busy, upwardly mobile professional who owns their home. Targeted marketing might be achieved through targeted online ads, connecting with specific HOA groups or neighborhood associations. They might also work with established realtors who serve a similar target. Each business and market is unique, so the strategy needs to be custom designed to fit the situation properly.
Target marketing is a strategy of dividing the larger market into smaller segments and channeling marketing resources into the segment that is most likely to buy and be delighted. There are 5 general segmentation strategies for better target marketing:
- Demographic Segmentation looks at various factors such as age, gender, job, income and educational background.
- Psychographic Segmentation categorizes individuals by personality, lifestyle choices, social standing and a variety of personal interests.
- Behavioral Segmentation aims to decode the purchasing behavior of a particular market such as reasons of purchase, desired product benefits, where customers are in the buying process and level of brand engagement.
- Geographic Segmentation categorizes customers based on their location, local climate, culture and urban or rural settings.
- Firmographic Segmentation is geared toward B2B marketing and focuses on industry types, employee count, and financial characteristics.
Target marketing helps us to get to know a specific market. The key is to know your market’s needs, wants, fears and what moves them. This understanding helps to not only better target your market, but it helps in your messaging. There are 5 steps to developing an effective target marketing strategy:
- Analyze your product & service. What do you do well? Where are you weakest? Can you differentiate what you sell or what you do? Where have you been the most successful? Who have been your biggest fans and referring partners?
- Consider who can best afford your offering and who is likely to be delighted. Choose the top 2-3 markets and understand how they share information. Narrow the market segment down to the most viable size. Make sure the market segment is large enough to provide business volume and ensure they align with your business goals & resources.
- Create buyer personas and dig deep into their world. Understand their background and typical goals they might have. Outline their regular challenges and pain points. Where do they hang out? What problems do they have?
- Draft a marketing message that will attract your target market’s interest within 15 seconds. Support your message with key facts, stories and anecdotes that speaks TO your market. Solve their problem, protect them or share an unbelievable opportunity. Offer a hook or an opportunity for them to take action!
- Choose the marketing channel(s) your target market uses regularly. Be consistent and use any analytics to understand how your promotions are performing. Shift as necessary.
Target marketing is the most powerful and most efficient marketing strategy available. It ensures you know who you are serving and facilitates you serving them well. If you have a good product or service and you target the right market who will most appreciate what you offer, you should do well. Note that a target, much like a dartboard, does not prevent those from outside your target from discovering you. If they find you, serve them well!
Rick Wickizer is a trained and ICF credentialed business coach and a successful entrepreneur. Rick has served the building industry for over 30 years and is dedicated to adding value to all he works with. For information about coaching services provided by Rick, go to: rickwickizer.com
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