Before starting a marketing campaign, it is important that you first identify your target market.
- Start by determining why a customer would want to buy your product / service.
- Comprehensive market intelligence and research collection is required to identify quantitative and qualitative patterns.
- Next, segment your overall market.
The process of identifying a target market is called market segmentation. This is important because once you identify a niche using targeted targeting, you can focus your efforts on targeted marketing to attract a specific group of consumers.
Why is segmentation so important?
In marketing, it is not uncommon to have a target market that would be comprised of several different demographic groups of people that can be profiled into several different consumer groups. For example, I had a client a few years ago who was an online division of a large regional bank. His goal was to get new clients for the bank and for existing clients to open additional accounts. If I had a savings account, I would have been encouraged to open a checking account and perhaps a certificate of deposit (cd) as well.
As you could probably imagine, the target market for online banking was quite a large group. Your identified market was segmented into 5 consumer profiles. These segments were based on age and income. This meant that there were five different sets of marketing materials for a given campaign. While the overall message may have been the same, the copy and images were different depending on who would receive the material.
Market intelligence
Market research to gain intelligence on your consumers is vital to accurately determine who your target is and what would be the best marketing strategy to reach them. The market research gathering process includes using a variety of techniques to collect, analyze, and report data on potential consumer groups.
Segmentation
Once the necessary market intelligence has been gathered, you can devise the best strategy to customize your advertising and promotional efforts to get the desired result. Campaign planning should include test market groups and test campaigns. This is key not only to the long-term success of your marketing, but to make it as profitable as possible. In trial programs, the marketer must be able to identify which efforts will be successful and review the strategy to best reach each group of consumers.