One of the first steps in promoting an offer is to define a target. To do this, companies should focus not only on their own product, but also on their competitors and the market. How to identify a marketing target?
What is a marketing target?
A marketing target corresponds to people for whom companies develop their offer, i.e. (potential) customers. Generally, these people have needs and commonalities, for example in terms of lifestyle or demographic criteria. For a detailed description of these criteria and a basic definition, please see our article “What is a marketing target?” “.
How to define your target clientele?
Before tackling the definition of your marketing target, it is good to know that there is not always just one target, but sometimes several. To know how to do marketing targeting, it is important not to be guided by a feeling or wishful thinking, but rather by assumptions as realistic as possible and document them with data. The more exact your definition, the more precision you will subsequently be able to provide in the targeting of your marketing activities.
Step 1: Study your product
To define a target, first examine your product or the service you offer:
- What are your strong points or what added value do you offer to your customers?
- What specific knowledge or features of your product set it apart from the competition?
- What needs are being met and what problem is being solved with your product?
- What are the values defended by you, your company and the offer?
Step 2: study your (potential) customer base
After analyzing your product or service portfolio in depth, the following questions will help you know how to define your marketing target:
- What group of people have needs or problems that you are able to satisfy or solve with your offering?
- Who is your product specifically for? And who is it not aimed at?
- Which group of people fits the company? Who might prefer to turn to the competition?
After answering these questions, you can now set a target. There are a variety of criteria for this, which can be categorized according to the following priorities:
- Demographic criteria such as age, gender or place of residence
- Socio-economic criteria such as education and profession
- Psychographic criteria such as interests, values and needs
- Buying behaviorfor example, the frequency of purchasing certain products or the importance of price when purchasing
These criteria are valid for knowing how to identify a marketing target in the B2C field. Regarding the B2B domain, other criteria such as size of company and sector of activity are sometimes important.
Step 3: Study Your Competition
Look at the competitors in the market, how they communicate, and the group(s) of people they are targeting. This last aspect is often best analyzed on social networks, which allow direct exchange with customers. Identify the differences that set you apart from the competition and use them to target another clientele if necessary (or the same one, but better!).
Step 4: study the market
Another fundamental step in defining a target is to look at the market in which you operate. If you haven’t already done so, conduct a market analysis and identify opportunities and risks, as well as possible trends.
Step 5: Collect data and set a target
The biggest challenge in knowing how to do marketing targeting is getting data for each point. Various market research methods:
- Investigations: create online surveys that you publish on your own specific online channels or platforms. It is important here that the questions are precise and easy to answer. On the other hand, a sufficiently large sample of participants must be reached for the survey to be representative.
- Interviews: conduct interviews with people who represent your target. It can be useful to define personas or buyer personas in advance which serve as a model for searching for people to interview.
- Online search: use freely available statistics and, if necessary, analytical data from your website, if you use Google Analytics or an alternative to Google Analytics.
Use the data from your customer file, if you have one. To find out how to identify a marketing target, do merge all data : Describe the groups as precisely as possible and exclude (or add) specific individuals from competitive research and market analysis.
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After marketing targeting: use the collected data correctly
If you can distinguish your marketing target(s), use this information to align all marketing activities with them. On the one hand, this involves identifying the appropriate channels for your actions : online or offline, Facebook or TikTok, via a newsletter or the company blog. For example, the use of social selling or content marketing in B2B is described in detailed articles on the respective topic.
The marketing target also plays a decisive role in the design of your content strategy. Correctly interpreted, the definition of the marketing target not only increases your visits and sales, but also reduces your costsby reducing diffusion losses.
Monitoring the result: how to check if you are reaching your commercial target
Online, web analytics services such as Google Analytics remain the most powerful tool when it comes to monitoring the success of a company’s marketing activities. In the statistics you observe the origin of customers and their behavior – for example, if they complete a purchase.
Online store solutions also often analyze shopping cart sizes, repeat purchase rates, and when customers cancel a purchase. Many newsletter creation tools also provide statistics on open and click rates. In addition to the statistics stored there, social networks can reveal how successful an action was through comments and likes. The challenge here consists above all of merge all this data and interpret it correctly. Use this knowledge to continually check and optimize your target group.
