You’ve designed the perfect product or service. You’re excited about what it could do for your business. You know not everyone is your target market—you’ve read enough about marketing to know that. Still, identifying target marketing strategies isn’t your forte. Where do you begin?
One of the biggest holdbacks with small business marketing plans is their dreams of changing the world. They have a great idea—everyone should love it. Now is the time to alter your marketing ideas.
Targeting a specific market doesn’t mean excluding people and holding back from selling to them. Instead, target marketing allows you to get crystal clear with your brand message in specific target areas. This solidifies your company goals, allowing you to build faster, better.
Where To Begin With Your Target Marketing Strategies
Think of one perfect customer. A client you loved working with. Someone you would describe as the “perfect” customer to do business with.
Maybe you enjoyed working with them. Maybe you made the sale easily. If you could work with this customer repeatedly, you would love every aspect of your business.
Once you’ve defined your perfect customer, you can use that person as a model to build a target marketing strategy for your business. Where there is one customer, there are many. These are the people who think similarly and would enjoy everything about your products and services. They’re your raving fans.
Don’t be afraid to get highly specific. Rather than trying to appeal to a broad audience, target marketing aims to tailor marketing messages to a particular market segment. This means you’ll need research and an in-depth understanding of your target audience’s demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and preferences.
Target Market Segmentation Further Divides
Did two or three pop into your mind when you thought about a “perfect” customer? As you build a business, you target different types of clients. Each comes for a different reason yet loves what you do equally.
A single woman might have different reasons than a married one. An empty nester approaches life differently than one with small children at home. You can’t be all things to all people, but you can find the attraction to different groups and meet them where they are.
Market segmentation has you looking for a new approach. You might define it by industry—you help professionals in transition to find jobs in accounting and finance. Or maybe you prefer recent college graduates, offering resume writing and interviewing skills.
You’re breaking down a larger target market into smaller characteristics. It gives you specific promotional strategies to reach out and deliver to particular groups.
How To Find Your Ideal Customer
This is where you can get creative. There isn’t a right or wrong way of doing it. Instead, it’s about clearly defining your ideal customer based on whatever market segment you define.
Psychographic Characteristics
When you think about an ideal customer, define them by their values, beliefs, interests, lifestyles, attitudes, and behaviors. This helps you understand their motivations, aspirations, and preferences. It also gives you a chance to personalize your message based on how people act and think, enabling you to resonate with consumers on a deeper emotional or psychological level.
Behavioristic Characteristics
When you have internal psychological attributions and motivations down, you can observe actions and behaviors they make toward specific products and brands. Look at how they consume or use a product or service—are they heavy or light users, or first-time or repeat customers? Is it an impulse decision or a well-thought-out purchase? You should also determine ideal platforms and channels, where customers like to visit, and where they like to spend their time.
How To Tailor Your Message to Reach Your Ideal Customer
Defining your ideal customer is an ongoing process. The more you learn, the more creative you can be with your message. The goal is to reach a point where a potential customer says, “That’s me; they get me!” That’s how you win ideal customers for life.
Creating an Appealing Message
Your message starts with research. Lots of research. This is where you find your ideal customer’s demographics, psychographics, pain points, and aspirations. You can do this through surveys, interviews, market analysis, or studying consumer behavior.
With that in mind, develop a clear and compelling value proposition that communicates how your product or service solves a problem or fulfills a need better than the competition. This is where benefits matter. What outcome do they get from you that scopes beyond features?
Use language and tone that resonates with your ideal customer’s preferences and communication style. Set the stage—do you want formal, casual, humorous, or professional? Mixed messages will lose every time.
Again, this is an ongoing process. When you think you have an appealing message defined, give it another try. Ask different questions. A different approach may be all you need for massive growth.
Maximizing Engagement
Not every message will work with every channel. Video or written word? Social media or email? Again, there isn’t a right or wrong way. But there is a way to maximize each step you take.
Content shouldn’t just be content for content’s sake. It should compel your ideal customer into action. Do they need educational resources, or is entertaining video the way to go?
This is also about fostering two-way communication. Encourage your ideal customer to leave comments and reviews, take surveys, and spread the word on social media. You have to be active to stay active in their minds.
Driving Business Growth
As you grow and build, track your actions every step of the way. Monitor the performance of each marketing campaign and message for effectiveness through critical metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value. This will also show you what you’re doing right … and what isn’t working.
Experiment. Not everything will work, and that’s okay. Your goal is to refine your approach and identify what resonates most with your ideal customers. Be open to testing new ideas and adapting your strategies based on feedback and insights.
This is about delivering exceptional customer experiences at every touchpoint.
By tailoring your target marketing strategies early in the process, you’ll deliver value and exceptional experiences. It’s the best way to drive business growth and build lasting relationships.
