Target marketing is the process of choosing smaller market segments at which to aim your marketing efforts. It is the process of locating specific groups of people that have reasonable commonalities in terms of their description and needs.
Target marketing is a “vertical approach” to increasing your influence and market share. The brands with the most highly focused target audience are usually the most successful.
Here are the rules to selecting a target audience:
- Choose one target audience first. My recommendation is to work on penetrating that audience for one year before moving on. You can not be everything to everyone.
- Choose your target audience based on their revenue needs and budget capabilities.
- The tighter your focus, the more often you can provide them with relevant information and the more that this information will be beneficial.
- Choose you target audience based on you own interests.
- Choose the type of people that you like to do business with.
- Quality is far more important than quantity.
- Be Picky
- Experienced marketers know that if you are rejecting the kind of business that you don’t want, the more attractive you will become to those that are part of your vertical strategy. This also gives you the ability to become experts in your business as it relates to THEIR business.
Research Works
Don’t be afraid of doing some research to understand the vertical market that you select. There are some tremendous resources for this today:
- Vertical industry publications
- Trade magazines
- The Lifestyles Market Analyst
- FIND/SVP
- Nexus/Lexus
- The Internet
Demographics
The first step is to define WHO are target audience is. What do they look like? This is called demographics. An example of demographics are:
- Age of prospect or target company
- Gender balance
- Size of the business
- Revenues
- Location
- Industry type
- Type of customer base
Psychographics
But this isn’t really good enough. We also need to know WHY they make good prospects. In other words not just demographics but psychographics:
- Company or personal mission
- Management style
- How they make decisions
- Industry reputation
Example of my demographic profile:
Our weekly consulting clients are Southern California businesses involved in marketing growth oriented services. They typically generate from $3 to $10 million in revenue and yield a minimum of 20% gross profit. While we work with the entire staff, we primarily help owners make better management decisions.
Example of my psychographic profile:
Our clients have good reputations in their industry but seek to overtake their competitors who are typically old-line industry leaders. They have an informal management style but are committed to improvement, training/education. The desire to make better management decisions and become influencers in their industry.I encourage every small business to spend the time to develop their own demographic and psychographic profile.