Let’s Talk Target Marketing

March 1, 2023 | By beraadmin | Filed in: blog.


What is a Target Market?
A target market is a specific group of people you want to reach with your marketing message/brand. These are the people who are most likely to buy your product or services and are categorized by common characteristics or demographics, such as age, gender or interests. The more specifically and clearly you can define your target market, the better you can understand how to sell your product or services successfully.

What is Target Market Segmentation?
Depending on your product or campaign, it may be best to market to a smaller demographic like a designated area or neighborhood, rather than a metropolitan area. It all depends on your specific marketing goals. To figure out which approach is best, remember that you can’t be all things to all people, meaning, you can’t expect your product to appeal to everyone. Nor even expect everyone to buy it. You should instead focus on being different things to different groups of people. For example, if your product is a type of food that has meat in it, you don’t want to market to everyone. Consider the amount of people who are vegetarian, vegan or don’t eat meat for religious purposes. Defining your target market ensures that you’re not wasting valuable marketing dollars messaging to the wrong audience.

How Do I Define My Target Market?
A great first step to figuring out who most wants to buy your product, is to review who is already using your product or services. Gather data and look for positive feedback. This will help you define your existing customer base by age, location (and time zone), language, spending power and patterns, interests, challenges and stages of life. Then, you can distinctly connect and market to that demographic.

Step two is to incorporate social data. Social media analytics are a great way to see who is using your product or services and help you connect and interact with your target audience. Your job is to understand why a target market enjoys your product or services. A good way to efficiently gather data is to create a unique hashtag for your brand. That way, it is easier to search and identify who is posting with your product and what they’re saying about it.

Doing research on your competition is the third step. What are competing brands doing when it comes to marketing their products or services, and how is their approach different or similar to yours? This phase is also a good opportunity to identify what tactics are effective when it comes to who you’re trying to reach.

The next step is clarifying the value of your product or service. This boils down to assessing what sets your brand apart from others. What are its “wow factors?” What are the benefits of your product or service and how will it make your target audience’s life easier, better or more interesting? Make a list of your brand’s key features and benefits and note which ones are unique compared to your competitors.

Step five is creating a brand positioning statement for your target market. Explain what your product or service is, how it will benefit your audience and why they should purchase it. If you need help getting started on your statement, use this template: Our target market is [gender(s)] aged [age range], who live in [place or type of place], and like to [activity]. Our product benefits this group by [features and benefits].

A Real-Life Target Market Misstep
Despite its current market domination, Nike provides a great example of what can go wrong when you try to target too general of an audience. Nike started out with running shoes (its target audience being runners) but tried to expand its market to anyone who wanted comfortable shoes (target market being everyone.) When the line was launched, it flopped. Even though runners (the main target audience) were buying from Nike, casual users were not part of that target market, resulting in a failure to expand the demographic. Since they course corrected and narrowed their target market to runners, they are now the most successful shoe brand.