Given the current state of the economy, having a well-defined online targeting market has become more important than it has ever been.
There is every need to segment your target market because no one can afford to successfully target the entire market segment; this means that small businesses can effectively contend with large companies by targeting a niche market.
Many businesses say they shoot their marketing arrows at “anyone interested in my services.” Some say they target homeowners, small-business owners, or stay-at-home moms. All of these targets are too broad and wrong.
In marketing you need to set milestones on your path to growth, starting with a plan to control small markets. To control globally, you need to start small, with a narrow target group, and spread out.
If you swing at global domination without first conquering smaller markets, you may end up having so much on your plate that you can crush, this may eventually cause you to fail due to a lack of resources, know-how, and focus.
It may sound absurd, but being very picky about your clients at the beginning will benefit you over time. It is simply always better to be good at one thing before venturing into another, you will agree.
In this article, I will take you through great online targeting market routes which will help you identify the target groups you will use to gain momentum in your online marketing journey.
What is the OnlineTargeting Market?
A targeting market is a demographic group (audience), in which marketers concentrate their marketing effort, in the hope to achieve their marketing objectives.
For example, young people in their late teens and early 20s are a key target market for military recruitment, do you get it?
Parents with young children can be a key target market for packages like life insurance, education investment plans, health savings account (HSA), and car companies that claim to have the highest safety rating.
Insurance companies with such packages can set the mouths of their guns at these market groups and shoot their campaigns and be sure that their marketing shots are hitting the right audience.
A well-defined target market can be used to tailor messages to your audience and to find avenues where they can be reached
A random example of target marketing knowledge I have seen and always appreciated is found in a local supermarket, they cleverly place a large display of septic-tank bacteria packages in the house-cleaning and household items section (buckets, brooms, mops, cleaning products, and more) every spring and fall.
Are you racking your head to find out who their target market is? They are out to target people who are conducting seasonal maintenance on their local homes on septic or camps.
They sell a lot. Clever product placement, a great example of knowing your audience, and some behavioral economics thrown in for good measure.
What is the Purpose of the Online Targeting Market?
The most important goal is to be able to determine which subgroups can connect with your products in the entire population.
The second purpose is to enable advertisers to create a crystal-clear picture of the traits of a typical part of one of those target markets.
Once marketing professionals gather enough insights about a particular group of consumers, they can craft tailor-made campaigns specifically targeted at these markets, this leaves them with a better chance of coming up with a successful marketing campaign.
A well-defined and meticulously researched market group allows businesses to be sure they can devise a pitch-perfect marketing strategy, ensuring the right customers get to experience the best marketing campaign for that particular group audience.
Customers who feel like brands are connecting with them at an emotional and personal level are more prone to make purchases and remain loyal and attached to such a brand.
Ultimately, thoroughly crafting a target market allows for tailored messages, more leads, amazing customer retention, increased loyalty, cost-efficiency, and a massive revenue increase, while promoting business growth.
Types of Online Targeting Market
#1. Demographics Targeting
Demographics represent customers’ characteristics, which you can utilize to create more tailored content that suits and resonates with the audience.
Leveraging the demographics correctly allows marketers to have a full-blown, customer-centred experience.
This online targeting market option allows targeting according to family size, religion, ethnicity, gender, age, education, and even income.
These insights can effectively be divided into different markets, helping companies target customers more precisely than ever before.
#2. Location
Location targeting helps you focus your advertising on the exact geographical location where there is demand for your sort of content; this helps you take your ads to the right people. This type of targeting could help boost your return on investment (ROI) as a result.
Location targeting is based on a variety of prompts, including users’ settings, devices, and behavior on online platforms.
Targeting consumers in specified geographic areas can be an excellent way to reduce marketing costs and ensure focus on the right target market groups.
#3. Affinity-Based
When targeting based on Affinity, you are looking to raise awareness and drive consideration among affinity groups that have a strong interest in your products.
When leveraging an affinity audience, you are targeting people who have shown an interest in specific products and services based on the content they interact with, the purchases that they have made, or websites that they regularly visit.
Add affinity audiences to your online targeting market to reach people based on their specific interests as they browse the web.
Choose from a wide range of lists, from “sports fans” to “auto enthusiasts” to “fashionistas” to “luxury travellers” all to show ads to people who are likely to be enthusiasts in any of the categories.
For example, if you are an advertiser who produced an action flick movie, you could target the action movie lover.
#4. In-market Audiences
When a user moves from being interested in a subject to actively beginning their buying journey, they become in the market.
In-market audiences are perfect for reaching people who are in the middle to the end of their buyer journey, and a user is only counted as part of a market audience for seven days, up to the point that they make a purchase, or when they stop showing interest.
This can mean that the reach can be lesser than other targeting options, but it also means it’s highly effective because it’s far more targeting, and it explosively updates as the users are continually joining and leaving these audiences.
#5. Optimized Targeting
Depending on your campaign’s goal, optimized targeting allows you to reach new and relevant audiences that are likely to convert.
This online targeting market group looks beyond manually-selected audience segments in your campaign to find audience segments that you may have missed to enhance the campaign’s performance.
The optimized online targeting market performs best for advertisers in any of the following situations:
#1. You want your campaign served to an audience segment most likely to convert.
#2. You want to acquire new customers outside your existing segments and still meet your goals.
#3. You want to identify new people who perform better for your campaign.
#4. You want to boost conversions without increasing bids or the cost per customer.
#6. Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting tracks how users spend time online. It tracks what they search for and how they interact. It builds a profile of their daily activities and makes analytical guesses about their next steps.
Have you ever searched on Amazon; you will discover that search results follow you from place to place. That’s behavioral targeting at work.
It assumes that if you have spent time searching for something, you are more likely in the market for that product and may end up as a buyer.
If you keep that item in front of them, in their consciousness, you have a better chance of conversion and completing the sales circle.
#7. Contextual Targeting
Contextual Targeting also referred to as Contextual Advertising is where an advertiser runs an advertising campaign only targeting pages of content that is contextually relevant to the product they are advertising.
An example could be running advertising campaigns for Blood Glucose Monitors for Diabetics alongside various types of Diabetic and Diabetes Content.
In another instance, if you regularly search for golf clubs, and have bookmarks to your favorite local golf store, you might be targeted for future golf tournaments or the latest golf magazine.
This is because you search for things about golf regularly, therefore it is safe to assume you are more likely than the average consumer to take advantage of something golf-related in the future.
Remarketing and Retargeting Audience
Both remarketing and retargeting draw breath from behavioral targeting and takes it to the next level. It’s a great way to reach out to prospects based on the behavior they have already displayed.
Online advertising enables sites to show ads to users who have already visited their site. Past visitors will see these targeted ads while they are browsing the web, watching YouTube videos, or reading news sites, for example, keeping your brand top-of-mind and fascinating visitors to come back for more.
Remarketing can drastically increase your conversion rates and ROI. This is because past site visitors who are already acquainted with your brand are much more likely to become customers or complete other invaluable actions on your site.
Why Is Online Targeting Market Important?
Without a defined target market, you have to depend on “spray and pray” marketing. You don’t have a specified audience in mind, you are just randomly shooting at campaigns and chances are stray shots would be more than the ones that would bring you the result.
Without a clearly defined target market, you create a lot of content, publish randomly, and pray that something in your content catches the attention of the right people. It is the wrong way to go on your marketing journey.
That untargeted way of creating and distributing marketing content is inefficient, poor, and ineffective. The results you get from broad marketing messages are decent at best. Even if you reach a lot of people in the cause of that random marketing, your chances of reaching people that will become customers are thread slim.
So identifying specific target markets will help you craft tailored and measured messages that resonate better with your potential buyers. In other words, knowing your target markets will help you get your content to people who need your solution the most.
Tips for Online Targeting Market
Identify Your Existing Customers and their Characteristics
One way to identify prospects is the two-block method. Choose your favorite existing customers and then search for “potential customers within two blocks that meet their standards.”
As a small business owner, you likely already have particular customers in mind. List those customers and use these insights to start giving your target market some specific characteristics.
Here are some prompts to help you gather the right insights (which will form your target market profiles)
#1. Their Pain Points: These are problems they face daily, like loss of appetite or not having enough time to get everything done.
#2. Their Passions: what are they passionate about, find out, is it cleaning the oceans, good parenting, climate change, anything.
#3. Their Routine: This is how they spend their time, things they carry out as part of a regular procedure rather than for a special reason or occasion
#4. Whom They Influence: This is a list of the people who look up to them for inspiration.
#5. Who Influences Them: This is a list of people whom they look up to for inspiration, usually indicated by what they like and whom they follow on social media.
#6. Why They Love Shopping With You: This could be because they love your products, the customer experience, your prices, etc.
At the end of these prompts, you should have a list of insights that can build a vague target market profile.
Identify the Problems You Solve and the People Who Benefit From Your Solution
People don’t buy products for the sake of buying things. They buy because they have a problem that they need to solve.
Identifying the problems you solve and how you can make your users feel better will give you a good idea of who will want and pay for your solution.
Start figuring out your product’s primary value-addition by naming the features and benefits of your product.
The feature of a time tracker, for example, is that users can create a report of what their hours look like that they can send to a manager or a client. The benefit is that a time tracker helps users center on one task and complete it within the given time.
Compare Your Target Market Draft against Real People
Now that you have a list of target markets, look for some people on social media who match the profile. Doing so will allow you to know if your profiles are too broad or too specific.
If you find too many people, your profiles are likely too broad. On the flip side, if you don’t find enough people who match your description, your profiles are too specific.
Go on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social platforms and look for people who match your definition.
On Facebook, you can go onto business.facebook.com and search for people by location, interests, and hobbies.
On LinkedIn, you can use the search bar and filters to search people by their careers and history. On Pinterest, you can look out for what people are interested in on their profiles and check out their Pins.
You don’t need to find people who satisfy all these requirements, just real people who are two blocks away. This will help you confirm your target persona truly exists and give you even more insights into what those people care about, their struggles, and want in a product.
Conclusion
Online targeting market allows you to focus your resources on a specific market that has the strongest potential to purchase your product.
However, before this, there is the challenge of determining the right target market for a campaign,
and this has left many marketers lost and perplexed in the middle of the campaign process.
Their main concern is more or less the same, how to choose a specific target market if their product has the potential to appeal to a larger market?
This is a valid concern, as most businesses can indeed satisfy more than one type of market group, or sell products useful to a broad demographic.
However, it is crucial to understand that targeting a specific market is not about cutting off people who do not fit your ideal criteria.
Instead, it means selecting a market segment to focus your current resources on and grow with.
This and more challenges that marketer face when they have to select a market for their product have been covered in this article and in great detail too.
This should be a working document for advertisers who fall into the net of indecisiveness in the Online targeting market.
Placing a relevant advertisement in front of the right person at the right time is the goal of the online targeting market.
