What is targeted marketing?

Targeted marketing occurs when you group customers into smaller segments based on pre-determined factors, allowing you to direct your marketing material toward specific audiences based on their unique characteristics.

Benefits of targeted marketing

Common benefits of targeted marketing are:

• Cost-effectiveness: Since you’re creatingcontent for a specific audience, they’re likely to be interested by the ad and convert from leads to customers. This makes your marketing money cost-effective because it’s more likely to bring in customers from that audience than a general ad would.
• Deeper connections:Targeted marketing helps create content that speaks to your audience personally, making them relate to your brand and understand the value your product provides them. This leads to stronger customer loyalty, which results in long-term or returning customers.
• Ability to stand out from competitors:Customers favor companies that create specific content for them over ones that make generic ads for large audiences. When you curate your marketing for targeted audiences, consumers may pick your company over others in the same market.

Getting started and succeeding in target marketing

To build an effective target marketing strategy, start by segmenting your audience using buyer personas, which are semi-fictional characters representing your ideal customers. They highlight the habits and characteristics of your target audience. Conduct research to determine your buyer personas by:

• Meeting regularly with your sales team to gain insight on your audience and their buying patterns
• Using search engines to find keywords and industry terms customers search for related to your business

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Types of audience segmentation

When you break your customer base into smaller segments, you sort them into different types of audience segmentation. Some example segments include:

Demographic

With this segmentation, businesses cater their marketing material around factors like age or gender. For example, a clothing store selling primarily women’s clothes will target their messaging toward females.

Geographic

This focuses on the needs of your consumers based on the primary locations of your audience. For instance, if your company sells snowboarding equipment, you’d likely target consumers who live in states with mountains and snow.

Behavioral

This segmentation tailors your messaging around customers’ buying habits. For example, observing a customer’s purchase journey helps you learn what questions they asked before deciding to buy your product. Create marketing content that addresses these questions quickly so they don’t have to search for answers before finding your company.

Psychographic

This categorizes your audience based on their opinions and personalities. Survey past or present customers or use web analytics to learn this information.

Tips for being successful with targeted marketing

Once you’ve segmented your audience, create marketing material targeted for them by following these steps:

• Create social media posts and advertisements.Craft posts that appeal to your segmented audiences directly. Paid social media ads allow you to select the desired audience you’d like to target, which helps you attract customers who relate to your product.
• Use paid search to drive users to your website.After finding industry keywords your audience searches for, purchase paid ads on search engines that target them directly. Paid ads appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
• Write educational content and optimize it with search engine optimization (SEO).Once you learn your audience’s interests and needs, create educational content about those subjects. Use popular keywords and phrases to help your content reach higher search engine results.

Frequently asked questions about targeted marketing

Here are some frequently asked questions regarding targeted marketing:

What is the purpose of target marketing?

Target marketing helps develop effective communication strategies to attract more leads and increase customer loyalty. Once you personalize your messaging, create valuable content and reach the right audience, your business grows as more leads transition into customers.

What are the main types of market segmentation?

Here are examples of the main types of market segmentation groups you can sort your audience into:

• Demographics: Age, gender, marital status, religion, race or education
• Geographic:Area code, state or province, ZIP codes or cities
• Behavioral: Buying or spending habits or interactions with your brand or product
• Psychographic:Interests, beliefs, personality or values

Is targeted marketing effective?

Targeted marketing is effective if you research and build your buyer personas and regularly create targeted content. For example, if you start an email campaign, follow up with frequent communication to encourage customer interaction.