How would you define your company’s audience for commercials, promos, and sales? It could include students, stay-at-home moms, seniors, or young couples. However, these categories are still too general for small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford to advertise to everyone. Understanding your target market will help you compete with larger companies since market segmentation and targeting comes with a higher ROI over traditional marketing methods. Rather than running ads for everyone, divide and conquer your most profitable audience using targeted marketing.
Make the Most of Your Advertising Dollars
Defining your audience will not exclude others who may be interested in your products or services. It will, however, let your team strategize campaigns more effectively and direct advertising dollars to the right audience. As a result, the individuals who will see your ads are already more likely to buy from you. This increases both efficiency and profitability. Online advertising mediums include video, AdWords, networking, social media, and digital advertising.
Getting Started: Examine Your Current Customer Base
Where do you see the most sales? Although your company may want to cater to everyone, the chances are your most frequent customers create data patterns. You can collect and analyze this information to help determine the type of people who use your products or services. For example, do your customers include mostly young couples, families, or single adults? Do you receive more visits from Millennials or seniors? Alternatively, which people bring in the most business? Work to align these common characteristics with your sales goals.
Narrowing Down the Target Market
Most businesses know to consider demographics, but are you familiar with psychographics? Demographics include age, gender, location, occupation, ethnicity, and income level. Psychographics, on the other hand, contain subjective observations rather than hard data. These personal characteristics include:
- Values
- Interests and hobbies
- Lifestyles
- Personality
- Attitude and behavior
Incorporating psychographics means imagining how individuals will find and use your product or service. For example, where do they turn to for information? Are there certain features of a product that are most appealing? The more detail you use to define your audience, the more you can strategize for effective, targeted marketing.
Continue Researching to Help Strategize
If you accidentally narrow things down too much, you can always expand the perimeters. Once you have identified your niche audience, however, continue to research so you know how to reach them. Note how your ideal customers use the Internet, from social media and survey results to blogs and forums. From there, you might use a combination of advertising tools including sponsored ads, sponsored search engine results, video clips, email newsletters, social media posts, blog posts, and more.
Interested in seeing how targeted marketing can help your business succeed?
For help with everything from defining and targeting your ideal audience to producing killer content, contact Thrive today!
