What Most Businesses Get Wrong
Agency representatives are trained to not look surprised anymore when the clients inform them of the impossibly broad target market. The sad part is that agencies don’t empathise with this. They don’t understand it.
Why do businesses present the broadest possible target market? Experience. They know that anybody can be a customer. That’s exactly right. So, where’s the mistake?
It doesn’t work for marketing. There is a big difference between your business’s target market and a niche market to promote your business to.
Your business can sell to everybody. The marketing effort works best when you attack with intention without being generic. You can create 5 separate campaigns to penetrate 5 different sub-markets.
What Is Target Market?
So, let’s start from the basics. What is a target market?
It’s not everybody you can sell to. It’s not your entire customer base. It’s not every individual your brand is relevant to.
It’s who you can benefit from the most with this budget at this moment. It’s a potential chink in the armour of a dense marketplace that is almost immune to generic ads and messages.
Simply put, it’s who you want to target right now and why. Perhaps you want to expand your marketing towards the females. Maybe you’ve improved your products to better attract urban millennials. Maybe you think the B40 segment does not yet have a cost-friendly solution to a major problem in their lifestyle.
Two terms are important here. First is demographics. It’s the basic physical representation of people. Age, income, gender and so on. This helps agencies understand the bare minimum of who you think is relevant this time.
Second term is psychographics. This is a deeper explanation of what they like and how they behave. Were they born with a silver spoon? Are they impatient? Thrifty individuals? Obsessed about status?
Why Are Target Markets Important?
Selecting the right target market is critical to your marketing and advertising purposes.
Before the turn of the century, media had little capabilities of targeting. In today’s world, you can snipe your target with pinpoint accuracy. You can target 19-year-olds who just bought a pair of headphones in a specific suburban street for your headphone accessory.
Why Is This Helpful?
One word. Conversion.
By making promotional messages relevant to specific people, you generate a higher conversion from your ads. They engage with the ad. You make the right people curious. You also don’t annoy people who aren’t interested in this particular message and create a negative impression.
Case Studies
Coke: Back to School
Everybody drinks Coke. The management of Coke also understands the value of momentum. By targeting the younger generation, it keeps the tradition of drinking Coke alive. So, they targeted college kids through Snapchat, focusing on 50 US colleges. They adjusted their tone to make it fun for the target market. They opted for low-key branding without even portraying their logo. Guess what? It worked.
Huggies: Special Delivery
Every parent needs diapers. That’s as generic a market as you can expect. But Huggies created a campaign targeting a more affluent customer profile. They launched a line of more premium diapers with better designs on the diapers, better packaging and a soft monochromatic design concept for the ads to emulate perfumes. This approach coupled with effective targeting from media created a very engaging and efficient campaign that widened Huggies customer base.
Louis Vuitton
People of today prefer online purchases. That’s just a fact. However, there’s also one undeniable fact luxury brands understand about sales. Luxury is experiential. Quality needs to be enjoyed in person. So, Louis Vuitton created a highly niche campaign that targeted people in close proximity to their stores nearing Christmas. The goal of the campaign was to transition people looking at LV online to step into their store and pick a gift. It was location-centric, allowing for a big brand to communicate specifically to people in the area nearby their stores in the way the people preferred.
How To Set The Right Target Market
We understand you need eyeballs. We know businesses need sales. The best way to set an effective target market is to discuss strategy with your creative and media agency. Who can and should we target? What angle do we use?
The right creative agency can help narrow down your target market for the purposes of this marketing or advertising activity. If you’re doing it yourself, here’s how you can do it.
Step 1: Get Data
Break your market according to known demographic groups. Who are the ones buying the most? What about the least? If you don’t have access to this data, ask. Ask your customers and employees. They’ll be able to give you an instinctive answer that should help you better understand your customer base.
Step 2: Brainstorm On Who These Groups Are
How much do you think they earn? How do they dress? What other brands do they buy? How do they behave? You’ll be surprised at how much fun this can be. It’ll be of much more help than you think. Here’s a clue. The customer base rarely thinks like you. Empathise.
Step 3: Identify Optimal Target
As a business, are you looking to solidify your foothold in the strongest category? Or are you looking to open up a new market with potential? Considering your budget, which market will be more cost efficient to market to?
Conclusion
Unfortunately, this is not a step-by-step guide to marketing efficiently. This is simply a myth busting operation for businesses to better understand marketing. The aim is to facilitate better marketing practices and get you started on the right foot.
Stop treating the target market like unimportant data. Business resources can be wasted on unimpactful marketing and advertising. Talk to your marketing team about this correction, and you will be on your way to building a better marketing and advertising presence in the market.
Hopefully this helps. Ask in the comments if you need more help. We’ll try our best to help you understand as soon as we can.
