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Marketing professionals can use various strategies to advertise products and services, including targeting customers based on shared characteristics. Let’s look at the key components of this marketing strategy.

Targeted marketing is a method of advertising that uses people’s specific beliefs — such as their political ideologies, personal values and religious views — along with personal characteristics, to reach defined audiences. Marketing professionals can identify groups within these subsets, which are known as target audiences, and advertise directly to them through various digital marketing platforms.

Targeted marketing strategies can fall under four categories: undifferentiated, differentiated, concentrated and micromarketing. Conventional forms of advertising, like mass marketing techniques used in undifferentiated strategies, aim to reach a wide-scale audience spanning many types of consumers to increase overall brand awareness for products with broad appeal, like bottled water.

Differentiated, concentrated and micromarketing strategies attempt to reach audiences at increasing levels of specificity, making them useful for promoting products to target demographics.

This type of marketing has several components that lay the groundwork for effective advertising campaigns.

Having a strong set of data and information on current and prospective customers is crucial when trying to market directly to them. Marketing assistants, specialists and managers can collect this data from sources like social media analytics, web tracking platforms and user purchase histories.

After analyzing the datasets, marketers can begin to build potential customer profiles and adjust their ads to suit those groups. For example, if a wellness company plans to advertise a new vitamin gummy product, its marketers may want to take a different approach for lapsed customers and first-time buyers. To do so, they can use their in-house purchase history data to place different web ad placements for each group. Using social media analytics, they may be able to identify people in various stages of their wellness journeys and modify the ad copy accordingly.

By aiming to connect with a specific type of customer, targeted marketing can break its potential buyers down into groups through a process known as audience segmentation. Four such audience segments used in marketing are demographic, psychographic, behavioral and geographic.

• Demographic: Through this lens, marketers can break audiences down by factors like gender, race, age and income. Marketers often use demographics to broadly advertise their services, though they can combine this data with other segments to target subgroups within those categories.
• Psychographic: These qualities relate to personal value systems, such as political and religious beliefs.
• Behavioral: Behavioral markers include the ways customers use products, how they interact with brands and how they purchase goods.
• Geographic: This audience segment uses people’s locations to identify whether marketers would consider them as potential customers for a given product or service. Geographic segments may be as simple as advertising local services or identifying nearby amenities that people within the subset may need.

Marketers can also combine multiple segments to try to reach smaller groups that overlap within these segments.

Understanding a target audience is essential when advertising to niche customer groups. If a pizza restaurant, for example, were opening a new location, the company may use geographic audience data to find areas that lack sufficient competitors and advertise to potential customers in that area.

After identifying their intended audience for a given campaign, marketers should consider the right settings in which to advertise their goods and services through a process known as channel selection. If a company wants to reach new customers, for example, social media may help grow awareness through bold visual content. For local events, direct mail campaigns may be more effective.

With their intended audiences in mind, marketing professionals may see more engagement from younger demographics by focusing on short-form video content. Brands looking to reach older customers may benefit from email marketing campaigns and physical mail, as well.

Marketers can try to directly target customers by using personalized messaging through formats like targeted email campaigns and text messages, which than placing web ads with the hope of the customer seeing them and clicking through. Here, marketing professionals can use details like a user’s location or other demographic data to make unique offers or address certain pain points.

Consider a meal-prep kit service looking to attract working parents. By applying analytics that place a user within a defined age bracket and demographic (parents), the company can offer a solution to a potential pain point — that they may be too tired after a day of work and parenting to prepare a healthy meal. They can offer kids’ meals in the program, too, knowing that they are advertising to parents.

Marketing directly to a specific type of customer can yield significant benefits for businesses, including improved conversion rates and a higher return on investment (ROI) for their marketing budgets.

The term “conversion rate” refers to how often customers follow through on the marketer’s intended action, such as signing up for a subscription service, downloading an app, requesting additional information or purchasing the product in question. Targeted marketing content such as emails, social media posts and ad banners appeals to specific demographics, which can cause potential consumers in that subset to feel a stronger connection to the brand in question and may lead to increased customer engagement. 

Businesses can also benefit from a stronger ROI. Higher engagement and sales can indicate that marketing investments are effective and can help guide future campaigns. 

Consider, for example, a company looking to launch a new apple variety — it’s dark green and extra sweet. The business needs a plan to spread the word about the new product it’s selling. The following step-by-step plan offers a way to create a targeted marketing strategy:

1.������ Set clear goals: The company wants to launch its new apple and, after six months, sell 20,000 of them.

2.������ Identify the intended audience: Using data from social media analytics and customer surveys, the company identifies its ideal audience as older millennials.

3.������ Explore audience segments within the group: Next, the company can divide its millennial audience into subgroups: foodies, parents and fitness-focused individuals.

4.������ Choose marketing channels: With its audience now segmented, the company can identify its ideal channels to market its apples to its intended subgroups.

5.������ Launch the campaign: The company rolls out its multichannel campaign, with influencers showing the apple in branded content, in-store tastings and limited-time coupons sent via email. There also may be craft personalized messages directed toward a specific audience.

6.������ Analyze performance: Along with analyzing sales metrics, it’s important for the company to know the effectiveness of its marketing efforts. Its marketing team can accordingly track how many emails customers opened and the number of redeemed coupons. Its marketers can compare social media metrics with other products the company has sold, and it can contact local gyms to discuss how the free samples were received. These insights can help marketers refine other campaigns moving forward.

Marketers can use several best practices when applying targeted methods. To start, they should analyze data carefully to identify the right audience segments. Then they should select the right channels to communicate a brand message to each audience.

Maintaining transparency is essential, particularly when explaining how the company collects, stores and uses customer data. Failing to disclose these details can lower trust in a brand, thereby risking decreased consumer confidence.

Another best practice is monitoring campaign performance and adjusting messaging based on customer engagement figures. Tracking results allows a company to identify which elements are most effective, along with the ideal channels.

Marketing professionals should also aim for consistency across channels when they apply targeted strategies. When customers encounter a brand through several channels, a consistent visual and tonal identity can help to strengthen brand recognition.

If you’re looking to learn more about targeted marketing and other key business concepts, ������ý offers several business degree programs, including:

• Bachelor of Science in Business with a Marketing Certificate
• Undergraduate Marketing Certificate

For details on other ������ý degree programs, you can request more information.