What is a Target Marketing Strategy? – Full Guide, Tips, FAQs & More   

If you’ve gone through any of our posts where we talk about how to develop marketing strategies, you might have seen us mention market research. 

Market research has tons of benefits and can really make you prepared for what’s to come in your marketing journey. 

It can also be extremely useful if you intend to develop a target marketing strategy for your brand. 

What is a Target Marketing Strategy? 

A target marketing strategy involves identifying a specific audience segment or multiple audience segments that would be most interested in your brand. Then, marketing tactics would be developed to market your brand only to those specific sets of consumers. 

The reason why a specific group is targeted with marketing campaigns like this is that they have the most likelihood to convert. Target marketing strategies are extremely common and used by many brands worldwide. 

Its popularity is due to many reasons but mainly because it’s effective and it also does not take up as many resources as mass marketing. Mass marketing is when you would deliver your brand messaging to anyone and everyone without any targeting. 

What are the Benefits of Target Marketing as Opposed to Mass Marketing? 

Target market strategies are extremely important because they provide businesses with a foundation on which to build their brand messaging. 

When you start off as a brand, it’s a good idea to define the type of people that would be interested in the product or service your brand has to offer. This is because you want your ads and content to be displayed to individuals that would most likely be interested in it. 

When you run targeted ads, you don’t have to pay as much for the reach of your ads since you know exactly the audience you want to display them to. Not only will you pay less for the ads but you’ll also see higher conversion rates. 

This is because you’ve done your research and ensured that the audience segment you’re showing these paid ads to will be most likely to convert. Hence, it has a much higher return on investment (ROI) compared to mass marketing. 

So, brands that use a target market strategy are much more likely to convert customers and build an audience faster. 

Not only that but they are also able to retain customers through this same tactic since their messaging will be displayed to individuals that have already interacted with their brand. It’s a great way to keep your brand relevant and your community strong as well. 

Once a company sets up a target market strategy, it can use that same approach in other target markets. 

Any time your brand launches a new product, a new service, or just wants to target a different audience segment, they can use the same approach they used for the last one. 

Since you’ll have the framework from before, this will reduce the time, effort, and money that you’ll have to spend to create a new target market strategy. Hence, they are extremely cost-efficient once you make the first one. 

Target market strategies also help nurture customer relationships. This is due to the fact that your brand messaging is so personalized and speaks to the audience segment you want to target. 

Due to this, it helps you resonate with your audience and can really help your brand achieve loyal customers that can become ambassadors for it. This type of niche marketing is what can really win over a market segment. 

Since you’ll achieve loyal customers, your brand will be able to establish credibility and trust within its specific niche. This can help make it a prominent entity within your specific niche and thus, can easily drive sales and increase revenue. 

Since you’ll have better relationships with your target audience through target marketing, it’ll help communication. 

Your customers will be able to tell you about what their needs are and it can encourage innovation within your brand. You’ll be in a much better position to listen to customer needs and address them. 

Not only is this personally rewarding but it can also establish your brand as one that listens to its customers. It can help your brand stay relevant and eventually become the leading entity within your specific niche. 

What Are Some Examples of Target Markets? 

A target market can be defined as a group of people that are grouped together based on certain characteristics or traits. These characteristics are what brands use to describe them and group them into a similar category. 

The purpose is to group people into separate market segments so that a brand can identify what type of person would be most interested in their product. Then, they can target that group with their advertising so that they see conversions at a high rate. 

Some examples of different target markets include: 

Basic Traits

The most common and basic way to segment audiences into different groups is through the most basic traits such as age and gender. 

While this may not seem like much, these two traits can often tell you a lot about a person.

For example, a new make-up product that is extremely flashy and glittery is something that would be very popular among teenage girls. It’s something that wouldn’t sell well among middle-aged women. 

Hence, you can define your target audience as between 13 and 20 years old and female. You can then show them targeted ads and wait for the conversions to roll in. 

Other basic traits that businesses also sometimes use include marital status, job, income and more. 

Geographical Location 

Another common way to segment your audience is through their geographical location. This can often be very useful as your product or service may not be too popular in the area where your brand is based but might be more popular somewhere else. 

It’s a good idea to conduct research to identify if that’s the case since you can oftentimes achieve far better sales if you identify the ideal geographic market. 

Different geographic markets can exist within the same domestic area or within other regions. 

Companies who’d like to direct their attention toward international audiences may set up marketing campaigns in other languages. These would be languages specific to a certain region that the brand would want to target. 

This can oftentimes be a fairly large investment so we do recommend that you conduct thorough research before you commit to something like this. 

Purchasing Behaviors 

A consumer’s buying habits and purchasing behaviors are something that companies study closely. When you study these behaviors, it can give you key insight into how you can market your product or service to that target market effectively. 

It can be extremely effective to target certain groups of consumers based on what their buying habits are. 

Core Values, Aspirations, and Beliefs

Other than basic demographic data, brands can also target consumers based on their core beliefs, values, and ideals. 

These could be religious, cultural, or economic ideas that the brand feels their target market believes in and values. 

Again, it’s important that you conduct extensive research before you decide to build a marketing campaign that supports certain core beliefs or values. This is because if you promote the wrong ideas, you can offend existing customers and people that are loyal to your brand. 

Remember to be consistent with your brand’s messaging. You don’t want your brand to suddenly start condoning ideas that go against its previous core beliefs. That certainly is a recipe for disaster. 

However, if you are familiar with who your target market segment is, you can definitely use this type of niche marketing to your advantage. It would involve the communication of the core beliefs of your company and what it stands for. 

You must make sure that these beliefs and values are aligned with the beliefs and values of the audience you want to target. For example, a marketing campaign for your brand that supports a certain cause, etc. 

A targeting strategy like this can often result in your brand securing very loyal customers. People resonate with brands that share their ideals and belief systems. It can really help you build a community of people that will stay loyal to your brand and help keep it relevant. 

Learn about distribution marketing strategy and channel marketing strategy.

How Do I Create a Target Market Strategy? (Step-by-Step Guide)

A target market strategy is not that difficult to create and the process is fairly similar to developing any regular marketing strategy for a brand. 

Here are the steps you need to take to develop an effective target marketing strategy for your brand: 

Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience Segments 

The first step is to define your target market and the different audience segments within that target market. 

You have to decide whether you want to stay with your existing customer base and try to reach them with different brand messaging or if you want to reach out to a new audience segment. 

If the audience segment you’re currently marketing to is still fairly untapped, you can choose to develop new ways to reach out to them and promote your product. It’s a good idea to fully tap into the potential of one audience segment first before you move on to the next. 

On the other hand, you can also identify other audience segments that might be more responsive to what your brand has to offer. 

New companies find different suitable audience segments by studying their competitors’ audience bases. 

Step 2: Determine the Most Ideal Target Market Segments

Before you start to develop marketing campaigns that can resonate and relate to different audience segments, you must measure their viability first. 

You don’t want to spend a lot of time, effort, and money to create a marketing campaign for a particular segment, only to find out they’re not that interested in your brand. 

A way to check the viability of a particular audience segment is to study metrics and insights relevant to it such as your competitors’ market share. Metrics such as these can help you gain insight into whether or not that audience segment is worth pursuing. 

You must identify and choose the audience segment that will bring the most value to your brand. 

Also, remember that value does not always mean the number of sales or the revenue generated from that particular audience segment. Sometimes, value can take other forms such as loyalty or ambassadorship. 

Step 3: Determine the Ideal Marketing Strategy 

Now that you’ve identified the ideal target audience segment, you must identify the best marketing strategy to get your brand’s message to them. 

There are many different marketing strategies to choose from: 

• Mass marketing: Mass marketing is pretty self-explanatory. It’s not targeted to a particular demographic at all and chooses to encompass as much of the market as possible. This strategy is ideal for brands that sell products everybody needs. 
• Segmented marketing: This is where a brand develops personalized content and messaging for particular audience segments. The brand content and ads are then displayed to those particular segments in order to increase conversion. 
• Concentrated marketing (Niche marketing): Niche marketing is when brands break down customer bases into very specific groups. This strategy is often used by brands that want to increase market share over their competitors within a certain segment. 
• Micromarketing: This can be described as the most precise and concentrated form of marketing there is. It involves a brand developing highly personalized messaging to market to individuals within specific audience segments. 

Step 4: Create a Buyer Persona 

Once the market strategy and the target audience have been defined, another thing you can do to make your approach more fleshed out is to create a buyer persona. 

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the ideal customer for your brand. This is a person that would be very interested in your brand if they were to see an ad for it online or on a billboard, etc. 

You can list traits for your buyer persona in order to make it feel more realized such as: 

• Age
• Gender
• Job
• Income
• Marital status
• Geographical location 
• Hobbies 
• Buyer behavior 

And much more. 

When you have a fully realized portrait of your ideal buyer, it makes it much easier for your content creation team to create relevant content for them. 

It can really make a difference when it comes to creating content that individuals within your target market segments will be intrigued by. 

Step 5: Create Engaging Content 

Lastly, now that you know exactly the type of person that you want to target with your marketing campaign, you have to create content for that person. 

Make sure to make it according to the person you’re targeting. It has to be highly personalized and should be formatted in a way that is appealing to a person from that particular market segment. 

Make sure to format everything to make it scannable. If you intend to post links on social media to your online store or brand website, make sure that you use a link shortener to shorten them. This makes your brand messaging appear less messy. 

One such link shortner is Pixelfy. To shorten your link, register and log in.

Step 1: You’ll be at the dashboard page once you log in. From here, you have the fast shortener box where you can shorten links. The dashboard page also displays insights from previously shortened links.

Step 2: To shorten a link, simply copy it and paste it into the fast shortener box. You’ll be automatically taken to the next page.

Step 3: On the next page, you can copy the shortened link and use it anywhere within your brand’s content.

Wrapping Things Up… 

That’s how target marketing strategies work. Most brands in the world use a targeting strategy of some sort in most of their marketing efforts. 

It’s a more sensible approach to advertising as you want to display your ads to individuals that are most likely to interact with them. 

If you have any more questions related to target marketing strategies, please reach out in the comments section below. 

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