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What Are Target Markets And Why Do They Matter?

Today, brands communicate with their customers across multiple channels. Combined with the traditional means of advertising, social networks, search engines, and emails have become an inevitable aspect of any solid business promotion plan.

However, with the evolution of marketing, customer preferences have also changed. As they come across hundreds of brands every day, they focus on those that are truly relevant to them. Therefore, casting your net wide and using vague, generic messaging doesn’t work anymore. Instead, you need to know exactly who your customers are and focus on their needs.

That’s the main idea behind target marketing.

What are Target Markets?

So, instead of trying to get itself noticed by an entire market, a brand uses target audience segmentation to connect with those customer segments that may really benefit from its products or services.

Simply put, targeting lets you break up a broad market into smaller, more relevant groups of people that are really interested in your brand. So, instead of trying to get itself noticed by an entire market, a brand uses target audience segmentation to connect with those customer segments that may really benefit from its products or services. For example, a disability employment agency decides to market to a smaller, more precise market. Instead of focusing on a wide market, they should focus on two major audience segments – job candidates with disabilities or employers looking for such candidates. They could even go more specific and segment them by their location, needs, or job preferences.

Why is Targeting Important in Marketing?

Targeting is an important aspect of your holistic digital marketing strategy. It contextualizes it, making it more relevant to the right people and helping you build trust with them. Here is how you can benefit from segmenting your audiences:

  • Establish and maintain a brand voice that resonates with your target audiences. Targeting lets you build your stories, slogans, and ads around your customers’ specific needs, preferences, and problems.
  • Generate and convert qualified leads. Focus on reaching out to the right people, the ones that are more likely to turn into leads and, ultimately paying customers.
  • Set yourself apart from your competitors. Create personalized customer experiences that will humanize your brand and make it more relatable. When a customer can identify with your missions and goals, chances are they will choose you over your rivals.
  • Build stronger customer relationships. Targeting lets you understand what your customers really want, allowing you to craft your loyalty programs, marketing channels, and customer support to their needs.
  • Improve your products. Understanding your customers and listening to them regularly helps you put yourself in their shoes. Knowing what annoys or pleases them, you will be able to tailor your products to their needs and increase their satisfaction with your brand.

What do You Need to Segment your Customers?

Stat by building detailed buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional character that illustrates your perfect customer. It’s a result of solid market research and a deep understanding of it. The goal of creating a buyer persona is simple- to understand who your customers are and what their traits, habits, values, and problems are. Precisely because of that, to create a buyer persona, you need to focus on the following data:

  • Demographics– their age, gender, location, marital status, education
  • Brand affinity– what brands they buy from and how they interact with them
  • Physiographic features– their emotions and personality
  • Product benefits they’re looking for– what problems do they expect you to solve?
  • Sources of influence– what channels, people, and messaging encourage them to make a purchase.

Now, to create a killer buyer persona and understand your market, here are a few steps to take:

  • Analyze your rivals. Understanding your competitors and knowing what their major strengths or weaknesses are, you will be able to craft a better marketing strategy and rise above them.
  • Do secondary market research. Analyze the existing research studies in your industry to understand your market and target customers.
  • Do your own research. Set up online customer satisfaction surveys and interview your customers to get direct feedback from them.
  • Listen to your customers on social and read your business reviews regularly. Knowing what they feel about you, you will be able to improve your products and services.
  • Use tools like Alexa Site Overview, Quantcast, or SEMrush to gain insights into your website visitors and their characteristics.

How to Implement Targeting into your Marketing Strategy?

Now that you’ve done your research and built buyer personas, let’s look at how to use this data to improve your marketing efforts.

  • Improve your messaging. Establish a unique brand language across all channels you use, be it your website content or social media.
  • Content marketing. Create high-quality content that addresses your readers’ unique needs, educates them, and provides solutions to specific problems.
  • SEO. Knowing what they’re googling, you will be able to target the right keywords, put yourself in front of the right customers, and attract qualified traffic to your site.
  • PPC. Using geo-targeting and optimizing your ads for the right keywords, you will drive a highly qualified paid traffic to your site and avoid paying for irrelevant clicks.
  • Email. Targeting in email marketing is still vital, as it lets you send custom emails to different customer segments. By sending the right messages to the right people, you will skyrocket your open rates and email CTR.
  • Guest blogging. Targeting lets you identify sites and bloggers that influence your customers and build links there.

Conclusions

Targeting is important to both brands and customers. For your customers, it means stronger relationships with a brand, better customer experiences and, above all, highly personalized buyer journeys.

For you as a brand, it’s an opportunity to deeply understand your customers and focus on those marketing strategies that resonate with them. This will help you stand out in the overcrowded market, boost brand awareness, and increase your brand loyalty.

Hope these tips will help!

Raul Harman
Raul Harmanhttps://technivorz.com/
Raul is Editor in Chief at Technivorz blog. He has a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing.

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