Blanket marketing can be wasteful as it does not identify its target audience, so can cause causing the marketing campaign to lose its specific focus. This can lead to a lack of customer interest or response to the marketing message.
Targeted marketing attracts customers that will develop a long-term relationship with you and your business, who will remain loyal and want what you have to offer. Targeting specific customers can make them feel valued, understood and acknowledged as individuals by your business, and if your service solves a key problem for them, they may fear not being able to solve the problem without you.
So, how do you go about effectively targeting your desired pool of customers?
Here are five methods and tools to get you started:
1) Research your target audience. Conduct thorough research into the typical characteristics of the members of your target market, including demographics such as age, income, education, marital status, employment, buying habits, lifestyle characteristics and location.
2) Come up with a positioning statement. A positioning statement identifies how a brand will be positioned in the market. It puts into words what makes a brand important and how it is differentiated from its competitors, so that it is noticed by those who need to know about it.
3) Create an e-mail or SMS marketing campaign. In today’s technologically advanced, fast-evolving world, it is important to be able to reach your customers anywhere and at any given time. SMS or email marketing campaigns provide an ideal opportunity for a personalised communication channel with new and existing customers. This method of targeted, context-driven marketing has been proven to produce great results and studies show that 95% of text messages from businesses are read within 15 minutes.
Tools are available to organisations which can help them target customers more effectively. Some web based communication platforms utilise features which make it easy to target a particular audience. They provide the tools needed by businesses to convey their message to targeted customers.
4) A ‘CRM’ tool allows the user to filter the type of customer who receives their brand message. For example, if an organisation were to send out a message about dieting tips, they may wish to target women between the ages of 20 – 50 within their customer base. This avoids wasting money on messages sent to people who are not interested in your offering and will delete the message before reading it, and allows the company to better focus their efforts on their target market.
5) Design applications such as an HTML5 builder can help you design the landing pages for your campaigns in a way which appeals to your target market. For example, men are usually driven towards hard, factual pieces of information, whereas women like to be able to connect personally to issues, so messages should be tailored to these gender differences. Design applications allow you to cater to the preferences of your target audience, resulting in a higher response rate and ultimately a more effective marketing campaign.
