Target marketing is a business strategy that involves understanding and grouping consumers based on their needs and preferences, identifying consumers whose needs can be met by your product/service, and then focusing your marketing efforts on those specific groups of consumers.

This is an efficient practice, as it directly addresses the needs of consumers, yields better results, increases revenue, and helps build a solid customer base.

How to use target marketing

Target marketing can be achieved through the following stages:

• Identifying your audience
  
• Targeting your audience
  
• Positioning your product/service
  

Identifying your audience

Consumers will have different needs and preferences.After a thorough analysis of these factors,you can group consumers who share similar needs and preferences. The next step is to identify those groups that contain potential customers for your product/service. The groups you have identified are your target audience.

Targeting your audience

Targeting is the process of engaging your target audience and pitching your product to them. After identifying your target audience, you can focus your marketing efforts on them by using various strategies to present your product and create a precise understanding of its functionalities. The following are some targeting strategies you can use:

Location and send-time optimization

You can send personalized campaigns based on email recipient's location, time zone, and the time of day you've found they're more likely to engage with your emails.

Age and gender

Based on an email recipient's age and gender, you can achieve more personalization in the campaigns you send.

Purchase history and interest

Based on the recipient's purchase history, you can infer their preferences and interests. This will help streamline the services you offer to your consumer.

Custom fields

Adding custom fields (questions, polls, and more) to your emails allows you to collect information about your customer's interests and preferences, which you can later use to send more personalized campaigns.

Timely campaigns

Sending out campaigns at the right time plays a vital role in boosting sales. Sending out campaigns during festive seasons, sporting events, movie premieres, and more will draw greater attention and yield better results.

Levels of engagement

The levels at which your customers engage with you are key factors you must consider to optimize your business. You can provide offers and additional benefits to reward customers who make frequent purchases while sending personalized campaigns to customers who occasionally purchase or who seldom purchase to keep them engaged and encourage them to purchase your product/service more regularly.

If you own an online store, you can offer early access to deals or promise quicker delivery to customers, and if you own malls or stores, you can announce seasonal sales and offer discounts during festive seasons to create a solid customer base.

Positioning your product/service

Positioning is the technique of cementing your product/service in the market and creating an identity for it.

The first step in positioning is advertising your product/service features and spotlighting which ones differentiate your product/service from its competitors. The next step is to set the price, keeping your target audience in mind. After setting up the right price, you must focus your efforts on promoting your product/service in every way possible to create brand awareness and increase customer traffic. This can include creating a punchy tag line that encompasses your product's/service's identity to promote it loud and clear. The last step is to make your product/service easily available in the market. This will ensure customers have a healthy perception of your product/service.

Ideally, after running a series of targeted campaigns, email recipients will be thoroughly impressed and will purchase your product/service.

A key factor in the success of any business is customer retention. Even after a successful purchase, you must keep your customer engaged with newsletters, updates about your product/service, and articles about topics your customer is interested in. This will build a loyal customer base and increase customer retention.

Target marketing put into practice

A real-time examplecan help us see how we can use the strategies that have been discussed. Let's assume that your product is a high-performance computer.

Your first step is to identify students, working professionals, and companies as target customers for your product.You will then send personalized campaigns like "Student Discount Program" and other customizable deals with free service and additional benefits for companies and professionals.

Lastly, by positioning your product as the most affordable high-performance computer on the market, you create brand awareness, promote your product's message to garner attention, and hopefully achieve great sales.