One common error that can be found in some marketing campaigns is failing to define their target market. Not knowing who to direct your marketing campaigns to will not only make all your efforts go to waste but at the same time fail in communicating your message or what you offer to your audience. Finding the right market will ensure that all your content will be greatly appreciated by the right people. So what is a target market?
A target market refers to a group of potential customers to whom a product or service is aimed towards. Finding this group of people is one of the most vital parts in creating a business mainly because it sets the direction of where you want to position your products or services down the line. Your target market is basically the people who are most likely to appreciate your content or product. It also provides clarity on the needs of your customers as well as their motivations and drives. From there, you can build ideas that can help your business innovate products and services that are more suited to their needs and create campaigns that can easily be communicated and attract their attention.
How do you define your target market?
With the number of people that make up the market, it is much easier to narrow down on which groups of people you want to target. This will ensure that your product will effectively reach the people that are highly likely to actually pay attention to your product. Finding these people can be done by segmenting or grouping these individuals into smaller and distinct consumer types to give you a better idea of who will actually value your product the most. This is easily done through 4 basic types of market segmentation.
Demographic Segmentation. Demographics such as gender, age, marital status and income further define your primary target audience. Through demographic segmentation, a range of data points from your target customers are surveyed, such as nationality and ethnicity, education levels, employment status or family. Demographic segmentation can be done for business purposes as well, focusing on number of employees, market share and sales.
Geographic Segmentation. Pinpointing your market starts with mapping the location of the potential customers you want to reach. If you engage in online selling, your geographic segmentation is likely to include forum groups and social media platforms where your customers frequently visit. Opening a brick and mortar shop can require searching for the most efficient and practical space that your business can afford to maximize vehicle and human traffic. Using geographic data can help show the regions your potential business clients cluster in. These can also help you determine the size of your primary market.
Psychographic Segmentation. Knowing the emotional drivers that influence target customers to purchase from you can help design marketing messages that communicate directly to them. Making use of psychographic segmentation helps you interact with your viewers when aware of their values, opinions, passions and lifestyle priorities. This information can obtain insights into what motivates your current and potential customers to keep supporting your brand.
Behavioral Segmentation. Customers are likely to expect a variety of options enabling them to communicate with — and purchase from — your company. It is very important for you to understand your target audience’s purchasing behavior to generate sales and develop customer relationships. Making decisions on operating hours, receiving orders online, and interacting with customers through digital channels can be based on behavioral data.
How do you reach your target market?
Now that you have established your target market, the next step is finding out how you will reach these people to further increase your brand’s success. Knowing about customer touchpoints—the very avenues through which your customers come in contact with your business at any point of their customer journey—is vital to knowing how to reach your target market effectively. Knowing these touchpoints and the interactions that happen within can help you capitalize on the opportunity to optimize your customers’ experience during their journey and influence their perception towards your brand.
Now, let’s take for example the case of college students. What are their touchpoints? Where do we want to create our online presence if you want to reach this market for your business? Check out the following important touchpoints on a student’s customer journey!
Social Media – if you only have to decide on one channel through which to reach college students, it would definitely have to be social media. Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—these are the most common social media platforms that young people use these days. It is important to identify how they behave on each platform (i.e., scrolling mindlessly on Facebook, binge-watching on YouTube, looking out for trends on TikTok) so you can position yourself within these spaces appropriately!
Email – college students have to check their inboxes frequently for important class announcements and also do so to get in the loop with their favorite brands’ ongoing campaigns and to look out for any career-related opportunity that they can jump on. You can be assured that they check almost all of their incoming mail—the key is how to not make your mail look like spam mail from the first view. How you craft your content also determines if their inbox would only be a touchpoint that raises their awareness of your business, or would it also entice them to interact more with your brand.
Search Engine – Google is to this generation of students what libraries used to be for the older generations (and arguably, search engines do a much better job—a totally welcome technological advancement in our time). Students frequently consult Google for any question that pops up in class. They also frequent search engines outside of class sessions, looking up even the most mundane things and sometimes even asking for recommendations for everyday decisions such as what to eat for dinner. You gotta make it a goal to have your business pop up on the search results, especially on the first page, when students end up searching with a keyword related to your business.
Shopping Platforms – the e-commerce space has seen a rise in terms of customer interaction with the onset of the pandemic. With college students, they often check out online marketplaces such as Lazada and Shopee even when they have no plans of purchasing anything just to check out any ongoing deals and canvas products that they want to purchase in the future should they get the chance to. For businesses in the food & beverage sector, setting up your business in food delivery platforms such as FoodPanda and GrabFood is also a must.