When asked who their market is, some businesses enthusiastically say, “Everyone!”
While serving people from all walks of life is great, your marketing strategy could prove unsuccessful if you try to reach everybody.
For one, it will drain your resources and, more importantly, prevent you from attracting prospects who are ready to buy your products and services. With a more focused and targeted marketing campaign, you’ll be able to craft intentional messages, know which digital platforms to promote your business and personalize services.
In this article, we’ll learn more about target marketing, how to launch an effective target marketing strategy and why it matters.
• What Is Target Marketing?
• Why Define a Target Market
• How Target Marketing Works
• How To Identify Your Target Market
• Target Market Examples
• How To Execute a Targeted Marketing Campaign
• Best Practices for Reaching the Target Market
• Common Target Marketing Mistakes
• The Future of Targeted Marketing Campaigns
• Frequently Asked Questions About Target Marketing
What Is Target Marketing?
Target marketing is a marketing strategy that involves breaking a broad market into segments and directing all efforts to a few chosen customer clusters that would be most receptive to your messages.
It entails knowing your prospects well, particularly their demographic and psychographic traits, which influence their relationship with your brand. This marketing strategy is best understood when we define what “target market” is.
A target market is a specific group of people to whom your brand aims to sell products and services.
This group has distinct traits; for example, they may belong to a certain age bracket or income level or share the same values and beliefs. Determining these unique features is crucial for businesses to inform various aspects of their marketing campaigns, from how social media posts should be curated to which types of ads you should invest in.
Why Define a Target Market: 5 Reasons
The main purpose of defining a target market is to clearly establish and understand who your customers are.
Thorough knowledge of your prospects helps you establish more meaningful connections, outperform competitors and transform customers into brand ambassadors. These are the specific ways defining a target market helps your business:
It Builds Better Rapport
With intentional target audience identification, developing messaging that resonates with them is far easier because you have a clear mental picture of exactly who you’re talking to. Age information, for instance, helps you create branded content that tackles different generations’ interests.
For example, millennials, in general, are highly receptive to content concerning social issues, while Gen Z values messages that express authenticity. Understanding customers’ different characteristics helps you connect more deeply with them.
It Differentiates You From Competitors
Only a few businesses master the art of tailored marketing campaigns, particularly building meaningful rapport with specific customer segments and using the right voice.
When you’re able to achieve this, you stand out in the industry and make your brand more memorable among leads. As prospects become more familiar with your brand, you become their top choice once they’re ready to buy.
It Strengthens Customer Loyalty
With a thorough understanding of your audience, precision marketing compels you to engage with customers meaningfully through thoughtful content campaigns. You win their approval because they feel you understand them and speak their language.
“You want the reader to say, ‘Hey, they’re talking about me!’ When this connection happens, you are in the sweet spot of moving that prospect into a deeper connection with your brand,” said Jimi Gibson, Thrive Internet Marketing Agency’s Vice President of Creative Services.
As you become intentional in knowing and accommodating buyers’ needs and wants, you’re more likely to build long-term relationships with loyal customers who would vouch for your brand.
“When you know your target market, you can identify their hopes, dreams, frustrations and pains. Typically, identifying the target market is step one. Everything flows from this key phase of crafting an engaging and successful campaign,” Gibson said.
It Lets You Allocate Resources Strategically
Comprehensive customer profiling lets you know which digital platforms they’re on.
Itlets you strategically choose which communication channels to use when establishing your brand presence and promoting your products and services.
For example, when running social media ads, you’ll know which platforms would offer the most returns on investment.
It Informs Product Development
Target marketing involves various ways of collecting data from customers. This not only informs your marketing strategies but also the way you develop and improve products and services.
By interviewing and conducting customer surveys, you’ll discover product gaps waiting to become profitable business opportunities. Precision marketing underscores the importance of having continuous dialogues with prospects and existing customers.
How Target Marketing Works
Target marketing follows three steps: segmentation, targeting and positioning. Let’s tackle each one of them:
Segmentation
Segmentation refers to defining different groups of customers according to specific characteristics or traits that influence their relationship with your brand.
There are four different types of segmentation:
➔ Demographic: This involves grouping people based on population-based traits like gender, age, marital status, race, religion, educational attainment and income level. This is considered the most important segmentation factor, as it represents customers’ most fundamental human characteristics. Demographic segmentation not only drives engaging marketing efforts but also compels you to be sensitive to customers’ diverse attributes.
➔ Geographic: This pertains to classifying people based on their geographical or physical location. Where customers live influences buying decisions. It’s important to consider their location’s climate, culture and language when creating targeted marketing campaigns.
➔ Psychographic: This entails grouping people according to their lifestyle, attitudes, interests and values. For example, you may have a demographic segment of females 25 to 35 years old. Still, they can be further broken down into a psychographic segment of women who enjoy working out after their 9-5 job, love collecting luxury goods and don’t have the time to cook healthy food.
➔ Behavioral: This refers to classifying people according to interactions with your brand, such as browsing history, engagement trends and previous transactions. When executing the marketing campaign, map out these behaviors in the sales funnel and create content depending on where customers are in the funnel.
Targeting
After determining the different market segments, assess which clusters would be the focus of your marketing strategies.
Given the limited resources available to businesses, it’s important to filter through the customer clusters and settle on who would give you the most returns on investment. To evaluate objectively, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does this segment have enough prospective customers to drive business profit?
2. Can they be easily reached? Will they be receptive to your marketing messages?
3. Does your business have the resources to accommodate this segment? What might be some legal and technological hurdles that can keep you from connecting to this market?
Positioning
After identifying your ideal market segment, the next step in precision marketing is determining your unique value proposition to prospects. To define brand positioning, answer these two key questions:
➔ What are the customers’ goals and pain points that your business helps with?
➔ Why would a customer choose your business over others?
By having a concrete idea of the benefit you’re offering to customers and your competitors’ weaknesses, you’ll effectively position yourself as an appealing, valuable choice for your chosen market segment.
How To Identify Your Target Market
Knowing who exactly is in your market segment entails communicating directly with customers, analyzing data from your marketing and sales channels, researching industry trends and examining competitors’ strategies. Let’s break each one of these here:
Communicate With Existing and Past Customers
Conduct interviews, surveys and focus group discussions with people already buying your company’s products and services to learn more about your market.
Here are a few sample questions you can ask customers:
• What needs and obstacles does our brand successfully solve?
• What desires or demands does our brand effectively satisfy?
• Why do you choose our products and services over Brand X?
• Would you recommend our products and services to friends?
• What would make our products and services better?
If possible, get insights from former customers, too. They’ll be able to help you understand points for improvement and gaps you may have missed. New businesses that don’t have existing customers yet can develop buyer personas. Then, gather people with similar traits as your hypothetical customer profiles and get valuable insights from them.
Analyze Data From Marketing and Sales Channels
Marketing and sales channels offer valuable insights into your target market. Make sure to examine data from these platforms:
Website
Through website analytics, you’ll see which regions customers are from and what devices they’re using.
It offers valuable behavior insights, such as how long they spent on a particular page, how far along they scrolled through a page and how many times they visited a specific page or bought the same product.
This information is beneficial in informing your market segmentation techniques, enabling you to create a more realistic demographic or behavioral profile of the target market.
Social Media
Social listening is primarily used to monitor online conversations about your brand. However, it can also help you better understand the types of customers who are using your products and services.
Aside from social listening, conduct target market analysis using the social media platform’s reporting tool to see the age bracket, location and gender of your top-page fans.
Check the types of people leaving likes and comments and sharing your posts. This should help you better understand who your most receptive audiences are.
eCommerce and Point-of-Sale
Similar to website analytics, your eCommerce platform offers valuable information for target audience identification, as it will give you a profile of who your customers are, particularly how often they buy from you, how much they spend and which items they buy.
In the same way, point-of-sale analytics hold the following customer data: where they made the purchase, which products are most popular and how many new and repeat customers are in a certain period.
Research About Industry Trends
Keeping abreast of industry changes helps you identify market segments most receptive to your brand offerings. Look for studies that present opportunities to serve a particular market segment.
For example, a 2024 research says that nearly a third of millennials and Gen Z worry that their finances could lead them to experience homelessness. This situation allows banks and other financial services companies to offer solutions to ease these generations’ financial anxiety. They could be the ideal market segments for specific financial products.
Examine Competitors’ Strategies
➔ Your competitors may have already identified their target market.
➔ Observe their target marketing strategies, mainly how they create their content.
➔ Pay attention to the language, types of visuals, hashtags and influencer partners they use.
➔ Take note of how they articulate the problems they’re solving, as this can also offer valuable information about who they’re targeting.
Target Market Examples: Identification and Segmentation Done Right
Several top global brands have mastered target audience identification and successfully directed their efforts on specific market segments.
If you need inspiration for your campaigns, look to these well-known companies:
Starbucks
At a glance, this popular coffee shop seems to cater to every person who likes coffee. But when you look at its marketing efforts, it’s easy to deduce that it targets a specific demographic: young, urban, most likely high-income professionals who not only habitually drink coffee before going to work but also have a deep concern for social causes.
As you would notice from its social media platforms, its marketing collaterals are hip and colorful. The tone of its social media posts and comments is casual, informal and sometimes fun and witty. It highlights its corporate social responsibility and partnership with farmers.
Starbucks’ Facebook posts appeal to young, socially conscious audiences.
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Rolex
While it’s no secret that this luxury watch brand caters to affluent customers, it employs effective market segmentation techniques defining its target audience: middle-aged to senior clients who value legacy and sophistication.
Its social media posts carry a formal tone and highlight the intricacies of watchmaking, as well as the most affluent market’s favorite sport, golf.
Rolex’s Facebook posts aim to capture the affluent market.
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Apple
It’s obvious that Apple’s primary target market is young to middle-aged tech enthusiasts who can afford life luxuries and want to prioritize seamless integration among iOS devices. But interestingly, Apple’s target marketing strategies are capturing another customer segment.
The brand takes advantage of the uniqueness of its marketing channel to highlight its product promise.
For example, on Instagram, a highly visual platform, it promotes amazing images shot on iPhones. This powerful target marketing strategy aims at tech enthusiasts who would be impressed by the smartphone’s camera capabilities as well as photography hobbyists.
Apple’s Instagram feed
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How To Execute a Targeted Marketing Campaign
Launching tailored marketing campaigns starts with goal setting, followed by selecting the right channels and tools, developing content and then implementing and monitoring the project.
Below are the specific steps for executing a targeted marketing campaign from end to end:
Step 1: Set a Measurable Goal
Like any other type of marketing campaign, you must have a clear objective before implementation.
Your marketing goals should be tied to your overall business targets. Do you want to improve brand awareness, attract high-quality leads, boost revenue or establish thought leadership in the industry? Along with defining your goals, decide which metrics to evaluate success.
Step 2: Choose the Right Marketing Channels
Based on your understanding of who your target market is, determine the platforms where you’ll be running the actual campaign. Given the limited resources, it’s impossible to be on every channel.
Plus, promoting products and services that your target market doesn’t use will be pointless. That said, focus on the channels your target market frequents.
Step 3: Develop Market-Specific Content
Tailored marketing campaigns involve creating content that speaks to your target market, considering their pain points, goals and interests and highlighting how your brand helps.
Get content ideas from the questions they ask in the comments section of your social media pages or the forums related to your industry.
As you produce content, consider your most engaging posts, which are most liked, shared and commented on, so you can focus content development efforts on those topics.
Step 4: Test and Launch the Campaign
Before launching your campaign, test your content to gauge its effectiveness.
Conduct A/B testing, comparing two different versions of content to determine which one performs better.
On Facebook, you can apply changes to creative variables, like image ads or texts or compare two sets of demographics. Carefully consider the results of your A/B test and decide what content to include in your campaign.
Step 5: Monitor the Campaign
As you publish more content on your website’s blog or social media pages, assess how each one performs. Use the key performance indicators (KPIs) you set in the goal-setting stage when measuring success.
As you evaluate these metrics against your objectives and industry benchmarks, review your market segmentation techniques and determine their effectiveness. Take note of what worked and what didn’t work so that you can apply them in future posts, ads or marketing campaigns.
4 Best Practices for Reaching the Target Market
While following the steps for a targeted marketing campaign, use effective strategies for connecting with prospects to ensure a smooth, successful project.
These best practices are worth including in your action plans:
Tell Stories in Your Content
If done correctly, brand storytelling captures the audience you want to reach because it’s relatable. It increases brand recall because it evokes emotions.
The Hero’s Journey is a popular story structure that effectively grabs the attention of your target market. It follows the classic flow: (1) the hero encounters a problem, (2) they decide to face the challenge, (3) they succeed.
Athleisure brand Nike is a master at telling Hero’s Journey stories. Its “What If You Can” ad shows a teenage girl’s initial reluctance to try sports but eventually finding inspiration to pursue it after imagining herself as a competent athlete. Use the Hero’s Journey story structure as you tell your brand’s stories.
A shot of Nike’s What If You Can video
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Facilitate Conversations With Customers
Create content that elicits feedback from your social media followers. Try interactive types of social content, like polls, quizzes, giveaways and live Ask Me Anything (AMA).
Similarly, engage with social media users’ comments to continue the conversation. When people with the same interests as your existing followers see how engaged their mutuals are with your content, they’re more likely to connect with you, therefore expanding your prospective customer segment.
Popular makeup brand NYX Cosmetics frequently runs giveaways to promote its new products. Follow their example of making mechanics as simple as possible to encourage participation among followers.
NYX Cosmetics’ Instagram post announcing a product giveaway
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Harness Reviews and User-Generated Content (UGC)
Share positive reviews and user-created content in your blogs and social media posts. This builds trust, credibility and social proof, compelling more prospective customers to try your products and services.
Remember, it’s one thing to say you have great offerings, but it’s another when that praise comes from the customers themselves. While you can directly share customer feedback on your pages, it’s also a good practice to curate them to align with your branding guidelines.
As you constantly monitor online platforms for UGC, you may employ strategies to encourage more, such as running an online contest, launching a social media challenge, using a unique hashtag and tapping influencers to join your promotional stunts.
Take a cue from action camera brand GoPro, which frequently highlights different images and videos from GoPro users on its Facebook page.
A Facebook post about a GoPro user’s skydiving adventure
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Personalize Content
When creating content, always consider your target market and put yourself in their shoes.
➔ What types of visuals would be most appealing to them?
➔ What kind of language and voice should you use when writing captions or blogs to capture their attention?
➔ What types of content would push them from one stage of the sales journey to another?
These questions would help you deliver personalized marketing approaches that make customers feel seen and valued.
Common Target Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
Target marketing takes a lot of practice to master. Teams implementing this strategy for the first time sometimes encounter a few mistakes that keep them from seeing favorable results and achieving goals.
However, by being aware of these common blunders, you can avoid them right from the start of the campaign.
Here are some of the common target marketing mistakes you should steer clear of:
Not Updating Customer Data
Collecting customer data through surveys, interviews and website and social media analytics isn’t a one-time practice. Customers’ pain points, demands, interests and behaviors change over time.
Keep updating your customer segment profiles to ensure your marketing efforts reflect the current trends. Include market research in your monthly routines.
Not Targeting Buyers
When identifying the brand’s target market, some businesses make the mistake of targeting people who need the product but are reluctant or unable to make the purchase.
For example, in the case of financial services companies, a young student may benefit from a savings account, but they may hesitate to open one as they don’t have the funds to pay for the monthly service fees or maintain the required balance.
In this case, it’s more strategic to target students’ parents, as they’re the ones who have buying power.
Having a Too Broad or Too Narrow Target Market
The purpose of target marketing is to narrow down a huge market to a segment on which you can concentrate your marketing efforts.
If you fail to define that, your messaging will be too generalized, and it’ll be difficult to craft personalized marketing approaches and strategically choose which platforms to use. On the other hand, a market that’s too specific may leave you with only a few potential clients and tight competition, making conversion difficult.
Gibson explained this further, “Going too broad [may result in] wasting money trying to reach too many. Or, being too narrow in your campaign [may not have] enough eyeballs to connect to your message.”
“Finding a balance between an extremely niche target market and a broad, general target market takes time and research,” Gibson said.
Not Aligning the Message With the Audience
If, after conducting a target market analysis, you discover that you’re not getting the attention of your intended audience, this may be because your message isn’t resonating with your target market.
Return to customer profiling to ensure your message appeals to their demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral attributes. Remember, your message must be relatable to them. You must also highlight how your brand’s offerings intersect with their needs and wants.
Relying on One Marketing Channel
The benefit of target marketing is that you can concentrate your efforts on the channels your ideal customers use. However, some small businesses that aim to save a lot on marketing costs take this too far, sticking to the most popular platform for their customer segment.
The danger is that if your target marketing strategy doesn’t succeed in that channel, you will not have backup or supplemental efforts to sustain your campaign. It will be extremely difficult to attract, engage and convert prospects in that kind of strategy.
For instance, if you rely on organic website traffic alone and employ search engine optimization (SEO), you’re at the mercy of unpredictable Google algorithm updates.
One sweeping change and you can be bumped off the search engine results page, invisible to your target market.
As much as possible, explore multiple marketing channels. This will also help prospects contact you on their preferred platform.
The Future of Targeted Marketing Campaigns
Targeted marketing campaigns are set to become more sophisticated as advanced technologies become more mainstream. As target market analysis becomes easier, the industry will likely see changes in data privacy regulations.
These are the targeted marketing trends we see emerging in the next few months and years:
AI-Powered Customer Profiling
Marketers have been using artificial intelligence (AI) to develop high-quality content more efficiently. This tool is also beneficial in creating effective targeted marketing campaigns, as it can quickly process large volumes of customer data.
“As platforms gather more data on buyer behaviors and cross reference who an ideal target market follows, engages with, and purchases from, campaigns will learn where to find prospects online that more closely match your intended target audience,” Gibson said.
Compared to the traditional, manual approach of customer data collection that takes a long time to complete, AI produces meaningful insights about customers’ needs, wants, behaviors and purchasing patterns in seconds. In fact, it can monitor trends in real time as prospects visit your site, comment on your blogs and add items to their carts.
This allows you to use personalized marketing approaches that move prospects from one sales stage to another. An estimated 88% of marketers using AI said that the tool helped them personalize content journeys across channels.
Dynamic Customer Segmentation
This approach to dividing broad markets involves using real-time data to continuously update customer segments as customers’ preferences and behaviors change. It operates on automation, categorizing customers either through pre-set rules.
For example, a customer who buys X number of times within a specific time period automatically moves to the dynamic segment for loyal customers. Those with a high average order value automatically move to the VIP customers. Meanwhile, prospects who do not interact with recent offers are automatically categorized as customers likely to churn.
By using software solutions with dynamic customer segmentation, you won’t need to worry about the administrative task of breaking broad markets into segments anymore and instead concentrate on strategizing and developing high-quality, engaging content.
Immersive Experiences Through Virtual Reality (VR)
Virtual reality (VR) allows brands to level up the customer experience and engage more effectively with their target market. It’s an elevated kind of storytelling, as prospects are immersed in the narrative and can try your products and services in a dynamic environment.
Some car brands have already adopted VR in their targeted marketing campaigns, allowing prospective customers to “test-drive” their vehicles and go on a virtual joy ride. Similarly, real estate brokerage firms use VR to showcase houses for sale at trade shows to give homebuyers a feel of the properties they’re selling even without going to the actual site. With an immersive experience, car and property buyers are more inclined to consider purchasing.
A 2022 study from PwC showed that shoppers were using VR, with 32% buying items after checking them out on VR channels. In retail and other industries, VR has been gaining traction in targeted marketing campaigns.
Greater Emphasis on Data Privacy
Given the recent developments in protecting customer data, targeted marketing campaigns could be more challenging for marketers.
In January 2020, Google announced its plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser within two years. Since then, though, the search engine giant has been delaying the phase-out, with the latest update postponing it to 2025.
Other popular browsers are also regulating the use of cookies. Mozilla Firefox features Total Cookie Protection, which keeps cookies on the site where they were created, disabling them from tracking user activities across websites.
Meanwhile, in January 2021, tech powerhouse Apple rolled out App Tracking Transparency, which requires apps to obtain the user’s consent in tracking data and provide an opt-out. With these stringent data privacy rules, marketers must gear up for a cookieless era and use alternative solutions for collecting customer data.
Some tactics you should consider include focusing on first-party data or information collected directly from web visitors and using universal IDs, unique user IDs that identify users across various websites and devices.
Implement a Robust Targeted Marketing Campaign With Thrive
Target marketing strategies capture high-quality leads, cultivate strong rapport and customer loyalty, and help improve products and services. However, they require expertise, resources and sophisticated technologies to execute successfully.
To achieve your desired results, consider partnering with a full-service digital marketing agency like Thrive.
Our company specializes in various online marketing services, prioritizing reaching a well-defined audience. Whether you need search engine optimization (SEO), social media management, or eCommerce optimization, Thrive can help you reach your intended market.
Contact our team today to get a free marketing proposal.
Frequently Asked Questions About Target Marketing
CAN I TARGET MORE THAN ONE AUDIENCE?
Yes, it’s possible to have more than one target market. The primary target market is where you should concentrate your efforts because they’re the ones with the strongest interest in your products and services. A secondary target market is a smaller audience but has the potential to expand and develop interest in the brand.
WHAT IS THE TARGET MARKET PROFILE?
The target market profile comprehensively describes the prospective customers to whom you aim to sell your products and services. It covers demographic traits such as age, gender, marital status and race and psychographic features like life goals, belief systems and interests.
HOW DO YOU DEFINE A GOOD TARGET MARKET?
A good target market has the following characteristics:
• Specific: The customer segment is well-defined. Your business knows exactly how old this group is, where they live, how many products they purchased in the last month and which social platforms they use.
• Suited: Your customers’ needs and wants can be satisfied with your company’s products and services. This group of prospects is suited to your offers.
• Accessible: The customer segment can be easily reached. These prospects may already be engaging with or buying from your brand on different platforms.
