How To Choose Your Target Audience With a Marketing Strategy (Reach Potential Customer)

Reaching your target market is a crucial part of any business. The more you achieve your target audience with an accurate marketing strategy the more your business will grow. But here one important question arises in everyone’s mind-what is a target market or audience?

The question is quite legit which must come in every reader’s mind about the target market or audience. In a simple way if we want to say the target market is the collection of potential customers that are ready to buy our product.

According to experts, targeting marketing is one such strategy that segregates a large market into smaller reachable units. And it also helps to get a better focus on a specific group of audience within that segment.

It defines the segment of the audiences that are based on their different characteristics and focuses solely on serving them. Target marketing helps brands to connect with a specific audience segment instead of an entire market.

The purpose of target marketing is crucial. Marketing your business is not as simple as broadcasting your advertisements to any audience.

It is necessary that you must know your customers and group them to successfully help drive your business.

In order to best identify your customers, there are a few important things which you should consider.

Choose Your Target Audience

Given below are essential traits that play a vital role for any business because, it helps to know their prospect audience and impact on their brand, including its products services.

1. Distinction by Geography

Country, city, region, area code, neighborhood are the keys to Geographic segments. With the help of these keys, you will reach out a specific part of the Geographic area as it helps to segment in smaller areas in order to connect with a specific group of customers. This is great for reaching a specific location that suits your business.

2. Distinction by Demography

Segmenting only a portion of a particular region by its population can also help you connect with your audience. Age, gender, education, marital status, race, religion, etc can help you to reach out to a specific type of audience. Selecting the audience demographically will further allow you to target the market quite effectively.

3. Distinction by Psychology

This refers to targeting your customers by their emotional state of mind rather than a physical location. In this segment, your audience is driven by values, lifestyle, interest, and other characteristics. For example- If you are launching your products which is having some meat content, at the place where there is psychology not to eat then it will harm your marketing plan.

4. Distinction by Behaviour

Then there is behavioral segmentation for targeting marketing. This type of market segmentation usually applies to the habits of people, such as their purchasing and spending habits, user status, interactions with the brand, or its product or service.

5. Firmographic Segmentation

This is a type of segmentation that is mainly targeted by B2B firms. In this type of segmentation, many concerns target those business houses which are using their product for further production. In this segmentation, corporations consider points like company size, number of employees and addressing parameters and many more. They are furthermore divided into a bulk buyer on small buyers and this segment can be considered as the most important for B2B business houses.

The marketing strategy you need to follow to reach your target audience

Targeting in marketing can serve both customers and your brand. Also, it improves product development and operations. It allows a brand to differentiate itself, stand out and make a bigger impact. But before you start target marketing, you need to figure out all its important aspects. A buyer persona is a description of a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer. It is a detailed summary of the characteristics, qualities, and habits of a person who is in your target audience.

Knowing your ideal audience helps you determine which target audiences to focus on. When you deeply understand who your ideal customers are, you can identify ways to segment them into a more specifically defined audience. To being successful at targeting marketing, use real data and facts to form your buyer persona. This can also be done with having an accurate content marketing strategy. The targeting strategy is where the marketing-mix comes together to create the right offer to the right segment of the audience to reach marketing goals.

Here are the best marketing strategies examples which anyone can implement to reach their target audience-

1. Differentiated Marketing

In a differentiated marketing strategy, the company decides to provide separate offerings to each different market segment. It is also called multi-segment marketing. The company targets each segment in a particular way to offer unique benefits to different audience segments. The main goal of differentiated marketing is to help the company increase sales and market share across each segment it targets.

A differentiated strategy can be a smart approach for new companies to enter the market and gain customer’s attention to them from established players to capture share in a large overall market. Established companies don’t give sufficient attention to the perfect marketing mix for any given market segment and become vulnerable to new competitors.

However, differentiated marketing is also very expensive because it carries higher costs for a company to develop unique products. Each unique product and market segment requires its own marketing plans and executions like unique messages, campaigns, promotional tactics, and investments. Costs can add up quickly if you are targeting a lot of unique market segments.

2. Partner with allies

Partnering with allies is never new to the market when any giant company is bombarding their marketing plans than many small companies collaborate with each other to deliver better content which is more cost-effective. This type of strategy is cheaper to create, able to see success quickly and also helps in exposing your brand to a new audience.

There is a case study of a well-known telecom industry name ‘Jio'(Indian) when this company is stepping his feet in the market it starts with its lucrative plans. And after getting a huge number of the user base(by Jio), it’s anti company(Idea and Vodafone) starts to collaborate with each other to survive and give a stiff competition to the latter one.

3. Mostly use ‘user’ generated content(UGC)

In the current scenario mostly the users concentrate on the content developed by there peers. According to the survey done on 839 millennials found that they spend more than 5 hours on the content created by their known people. The same survey reveals that they only spent 33 percent on their traditional media. In the same survey, it was also revealed that millennials are 20% influenced by UGC on their purchase than any other media.

So this is the most important strategy in which you are attracting customers by explaining the live event stories. This can be achieved by sharing customer’s personal stories on different social sharing platforms i.e Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and many more.

4. Promote your product with influencers

The newest and advanced way to promote your product and gain a new audience by collaborating with influencers. There are multiple benefits as it will extend brand awareness among your targeted audience and increase your sales. As recently we can see Amazon (an e-commerce brand) too has launched its influencer program in which it is providing a commission to these influencers for the sale made by these influencers.

5. Let customers interact

This is also an emotional point in which the customers want to interact with the company or the other customers. Providing facilities to the customers to see the manufacturing of the product or competition among your casual customers regarding the product or any other one. These types of moments are always remembered in customer’s minds.

6. Undifferentiated or Mass Marketing

Undifferentiated or mass marketing involves marketing to the entire market the same way. In Mass marketing, we effectively ignore segmentation and generates a single offer and marketing mix for everyone. The market is treated as a homogeneous aggregate, So that the aim of Mass marketing is to reach the largest possible audiences, and exposure to the product is maximized. Mass marketing tries to spread awareness of services or products to everyone willing to listen.

The success of mass-marketing depends on whether it is possible to reach enough people, through mass-communication techniques and one universal product offer, to keep them interested in the product and make the strategy worthwhile. While mass-marketing tactics tend to be costly because they operate on a large scale, this approach yields efficiencies and cost savings for companies because it requires the marketing team to execute one product offer and marketing mix.

7. Niche Marketing

An organization that adopts a niche strategy gains an advantage by focusing all efforts on only one or a small handful of segments. The main focus of their market analysis, product development, marketing strategy, and tactics is to concentrate on serving that selected part of the market. Niche marketing is also called concentrated marketing. In Niche Marketing strategy only one or a few very defined and specific segments of the consumer population are targeted. The goal is to achieve high penetration among the narrowly defined target segments. For example, The Rolex watch manufacturer only concentrates on the luxury segment of the watch market.

Niche targeting effectively works for small companies that have limited resources because it is not required to use mass production, mass distribution, or mass advertising. When becoming highly successful in Niche Market Segment leads to be very profitable for a company. Luxury-goods providers are the great challenges of the Niche Marketing strategy.

8. Publish Funny Content

This strategy is also more appealing and creating more engagements among the targeted audience. In this, the company usually makes funny videos and share them on different video sharing platforms. Many brands use Youtube, Tik-Tok, Instagram and more for publishing their funny videos

9. Behave Weirdly

Don’t work safely every time i.e don’t play safely. Sometimes think a little bit differently and behave weirdly while marketing your product. For example- A contest run by a museum in Chicago of science and industry allows one winner to live inside the museum for 30 days. And that winner has to share his thoughts and experiences on different social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

In this, the winner also became a point of attraction among visitors which led to the influx of many visitors to the museum. After following this strategy the museum eventually earned from this strategy and promoted that the environment of the museum is cool to visit for learning and entertainment purposes.

10. Micro Marketing strategy

It is also a targeting strategy that focuses even more narrowly than niche marketing. It caters to the needs of specific individuals or very small segments in targeted geography, which may be called local marketing. Micro-marketing is a very powerful marketing strategy by giving consumers exactly what they want and when they want it. However, to achieve large-scale success in Macro Marketing companies must figure out how to meet highly individualized needs efficiently and profitably. In this approach, companies offer consumers products created to their individual specifications and needs.

To achieve a wide-scale success with individual marketing requires you to develop product strategies. Frequently, this involves offering a baseline product with parameters so that customers can customize to fit their needs. Local marketing is a targeting strategy in which we expressly focus on a small, clearly defined neighborhood or geographic area. Organizations using this technique strive to generate a strong local presence and targets.

11. Special attention to existing customers

Gaining new customers is the first priority of any new business to grow. But don’t forget your existing customers they are the real gems who will stay longer with your product. Make them feel that they are VIP members of the customer’s exclusive club. Give them something extra which will make them feel proud.

As you can do some type of upselling at a lower rate which will keep your existing customers with you in the future.

12. Storytelling on different medias

As we already know storytelling is the most effective way of marketing. A huge number of peoples are majorly influenced by the story as they can easily correlate with themselves. This is very effective as this strategy can have a greater influence over the targeted customers.

As by storytelling, many brands are implementing their marketing tactic more effectively and efficiently.

Here is some case studies of business brands that help them to grow in a large giant company.

Case study of marketing strategy

Airbnb

Simply telling a story ‘Airbnb’ has increased its travelers from 2000 visitors using the service five years ago to 550,000 in 2015. The total visitors are spotted in more than 20000 cities all over the world.

“This is how Airbnb uses their intricate understanding of their audience and helps in making it one of the most iconic brand”

Major Highlights- New york has topped the list by 47000 travelers. This is how one simple brand uses customer’s data to tell engaging stories in front of their audience i.e travelers and visitors.

Spotify

“Spotify” a well known online music streaming platform uses its 30 million users data of what song, playlist and artist they listen and collaborate with location and demographics to give a better experience to its users. And after having it, it gives better insights to develop their own stories.

Using these simple data now only Spotify can develop their own stories based on these insights that only they can access to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Smar trike

Smar trike is a company that manufactures bicycles for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. And they want to do promotions with the help of influencers. Their goal was to reach among 25-40years old mothers having a baby 8-18 months.

This was one of the best case studies to read for promoting your products with influencers.

Stay Focused on your marketing strategy

Staying Focused on targeting in marketing helps you to get everyone in the organization on the same page so you to be more specific about your marketing strategies. It helps you clarify your vision. You have more directions to shaping a plan for marketing and business goals to optimize your resources, time, and budget.

Conclusion

Without developing a vital targeting in marketing strategy your efforts to attract customers are likely to be haphazard and inefficient. The focus of your strategy is to make sure that your products and services meet customer needs.

Developing long-term and profitable relationships with your customers is a key point of any marketing strategy. You will need to create a flexible marketing plan so that it can respond to changes in customer perceptions and demand.

Marketing strategy help to identify and communicate the benefits of your business offering to your targeted market. Once you create and implement your strategy, monitor its effectiveness and adjustments. Change them when it requires to maintain success.