4 Types Of Target Marketing And Their Best Uses In 2021

Target Marketing And Their Best Uses

For a marketing strategy to be most effective, one of the most important things is to find the right audience to focus on. Broad marketing campaigns may work for brands with a wide market, products, and no specific audience or brands looking to only push awareness. But the fact is there’s no product that’s good for every customer.

That makes the ability to refine your market audience the best way to improve your marketing campaign, creating more sales and revenue. When you understand who you’re targeting, you get the right marketing language and features that will drive your audience to purchase your products or services. It all starts with market research and the definition of the consumer base you’re trying to engage with.

But how do you define your target markets and choose which is the best for your business? Look at these four types of target marketing and how to apply them in your marketing strategy.

1. Geographic Target Marketing

This is the where of your target audience, also called location-based marketing. It focuses on selling to customers based on their physical location. Customers in different locations have different needs and want, which can affect how they interact with a product or service. Similarly, customers within the same area may have similar preferences. You can segment your market by country, state, city, zip code, etc.

This helps your marketing effort to be narrowed down customers in a specific area ensuring that you don’t waste resources reaching to people who may be unable to access your services. You’re only reaching out to those customers who have the greatest impact on your sales and bottom line. For example, if you’re a lawn care service company, you need to direct your marketing to an area with a higher percentage of senior citizens.

2. Demographic Target Marketing

This is where you break down your customer personas based on their identifiable non-character traits such as age, ethnicity, religion, income, gender, profession, etc. The best use for this type of target marketing is when your products or services are focused on a particular group. The idea is that customers within your chosen demographic trait possess similar purchasing habits.

The good thing with this type of target marketing is that information is easier to obtain. For example, census data can reveal most of the factors that make a person fall into one demography or another. Targeting customers by demography allows you to respond directly to customer needs and wants. If you’re a car dealership, you can easily use the information you get to market to people of different age groups, gender, or income level.

You can use demographic target marketing in several ways by either targeting one part, i.e., a female shoe retailer marketing to everyone who identifies as female. Or, you can opt for cross-targeting females between 20 and 40 years and making 24k a year. The latter is more target-specific within the segmentation, allowing you to effectively use several traits within the segment for precise marketing.

3. Psychographic Target Marketing

In psychographic target marketing, your aim is to separate the audience by their personalities. These traits include attitudes, lifestyle, values, and interests. You need to figure out why they possess these character traits and to enable you to capitalize on them. However, identifying this target group requires extensive research as identifying personalities is somewhat subjective.

If you can find that majority of your audience values one quality over the other, you can alter your marketing strategy to fit these values. The best practice is for you to try and cover several traits to ensure that you don’t miss any part of your audience. This may be the most challenging, but it’s believed to give higher yields. Targeting someone’s personality improves the chances of creating a loyal customer if you connect with them.

4. Behavioral Target Marketing

This is marketing that’s driven by customers’ actual habits and trends. This includes browsing, purchase, spending habits, product ratings, and more. You can use this data from a customer’s interactions with your website. It helps you to group visitors with similar behaviors together and focuses your marketing energy on them with specific and relevant ads based on the data you collected.

Segmenting customers by their habits helps you to distinguish between new and returning visitors and repeat customers. By learning how a customer behaves when they interact with your brand, you can tailor your messaging and ads accordingly. A person who’s been to your website multiple times but hasn’t purchased anything is obviously interested but needs some kind of prompting to help them decide. You can continue to nurture that relationship by improving your marketing strategies.

Takeaway

Target marketing allows you to be more accurate in your marketing efforts and avoid creating broad campaigns that look to appeal to everyone. By identifying a target group within your market with the greatest impact on your sales and revenue, you’re more likely to build better relationships and loyalty with your customers.

When applying target marketing, ensure your conduct extensive research to identify the customer segments in your market and which best suits your products or services.