Advantages of Target Marketing and How to Improve it

The methodology behind traditional marketing was to cast a wide enough net that the marketer would capture at least a few prospective fish (i.e. customers).

Take a highway billboard, for example. Of the hundreds of thousands of drivers that see the ad, only a slight fraction – less than 1% – will find it relevant enough to react.

You can say the same of radio, TV, newspaper and other classic channels.

It’s not an efficient system.

The advantages of target marketing allow you to lose the net and take a more direct approach to reaching your customers. It’s about maximizing the relevance and value of your marketing messages.

Anyone that sees them will be interested. Accurate targeting methods are how PPC platforms like Google Ads can boast such high returns and conversion rates.

With the proper targeting settings, you can improve the reach of your campaigns, raise your click and conversion rates and maximize your ROI.

This discussion will focus on the advantages of target marketing and how to select the most accurate audience settings for your business.

Let’s get started.

Target Marketing And Segmentation Overview

One of the pillars of successful marketing is your audience. If you target the right audience with the right products and offers, it’s a win.

Yet, many marketers fumble with this area. Over a third of all companies suffer from inaccurate targeting, which leads to them losing customers.

Target marketing and segmentation deal with drilling down into the specific qualities, traits, behaviors and other aspects of your audience.

It’s the act of breaking the larger market down into smaller segments. By dissecting your audience in this way, you can concentrate on specific groups of customers and serve them with the most relevant and valuable experiences possible.

In other words, your goal shouldn’t be to reach the entire market or all of your customers at once. Instead, expert marketers segment that audience into manageable parts. Then, they work at servicing each group separately.

What Are The 6 Types Of Marketing Segmentation?

There are four primary types of marketing segmentation. These are different ways that brands use customer data to categorize them.

  i. Demographic segmentation: Demographics include all of your basic identifying information, such as age, gender, education level, marital status, race, religion, income level and more. This data is easy to obtain and categorize because there are only a handful of options for each category.

  ii. Psychographic segmentation: This goes one level deeper than demographics. Psychographic data explores the values, beliefs, interests, lifestyles, personalities and other less tangible things that customers trust and hold dear.

  iii. Behavior segmentation: How your target customers act and behave fall under this option. This includes their purchasing habits, spending patterns, user-level and all manners of brand interactions.

  iv. Geographic segmentation: Where are your customers located? You can break down geographic locations into neighborhoods, area codes, cities, regions, countries, etc. Knowing where your customers are located helps you deliver content and messages relevant to their areas.

After these main marketing segmentation options, there is also business segmentation and device segmentation.

  v. Business segmentation: This only applies to companies that sell directly to businesses. Here, you might consider the size, industry, customer base, revenue and other business traits you want to target.

  vi. Device segmentation: With the rise of mobile smartphone users, it is now helpful to look at audiences based on their devices. Devices can include desktop, mobile, tablets, smart TVs, smart watches, etc.

Applying these various segmentation types allows you to get more specific about your targets. The more specific you are, the easier it is to create personalized content that is highly relevant and valuable to audiences.

Why Is Targeting In Marketing So Crucial?

Targeting in marketing is so crucial because your customers are so crucial. Without them, there is no business!

Your targeting will impact your entire marketing strategy. Advertising, customer experience, business operations, branding – they are all affected by your target marketing.

With proper targeting, you can achieve the following:

Marketing Strategies That Speak Directly To Your Defined Audience

Successful marketing messages resonate deeply with audiences. This is especially true in the Digital Age, where customers are increasingly expecting personalized experiences matching their likes and preferences.

Without target marketing, you approach your audience as a single market. This fails to recognize the smaller groups and personas that make up the larger audience.

You develop marketing strategies for the masses, which often fail to speak directly to the customer. After all, it’s nearly impossible to craft messages that resonate with every audience member.

On the other hand, once you have clearly defined audience targets, you can provide information, products, offers and other materials directly related to them and their needs.

Attract The Right People That Lead To Higher-Quality Leads And Sales

Marketing strategies that resonate with audiences are far more effective. With these clearly defined audience targets, you’ll have no problem acquiring higher-quality leads that are ready to convert.

Plus, these high-quality leads are more likely to become brand-loyal customers, which means they’ll keep coming back again and again.

Again, you’re trying to get out of the habit of casting a wide net and hoping you catch a target lead. With proper target marketing, you can exchange that net for a harpoon capable of hitting the exact targets you want to draw into your business.

Separate Your Business From Its Competitors

No matter what industry you operate in or how unique your business is, you face pressures from direct and indirect competitors.

Creating strategies that help you stand out from the competition is rarely easy. However, it’s one of the key advantages of target marketing.

Once you stop trying to speak to every possible customer and instead focus on small, specific segments of that audience, you’ll immediately start to stand out.

When customers feel that their needs are met and their concerns listened to, they’ll choose your business over any competitor that isn’t specifically targeting them.

Foster Deeper Customer Loyalty And Longer Lasting Relationships

The ability to provide direct, targeted campaigns to customers that cater to their specific needs and preferences has a profound effect on loyalty.

Since you’re relying on their feedback and suggestions to refine your targeting, customers sense that their thoughts and concerns are heard and utilized.

This makes every interaction with your business mean something.

When you change something about your marketing approach based on customer interactions, the customer feels that they are part of your brand’s journey.

Thus, they’ll continue to support your business and remain loyal for years. It’s about making the audience feel like more than just another sales stat!

Develop Better Products And Services

The customer-brand interactions that your business creates also helps in product development.

They give a clear insight into what customers want and don’t want, along with helpful suggestions on making your offerings even better.

By developing better products and services, you’ll start to edge out the competition. You’ll offer features and add-ons that customers are looking for but can’t find elsewhere.

It’s about putting yourself in their shoes and delivering the best possible products and services based on what they truly want, not just what you think they want.

Keep Your Marketing Team Efficient And Focused

One of the less-discussed advantages of target marketing is its effect on your organization, specifically your marketing team.

While segmenting and refining your audience may require some extra work, it’s easier to manage in the long run.

Once you define your audience segments, you have a much clearer marketing vision. It’s easier to develop specific strategies that market to specific audiences, rather than the entire market at once.

This will keep your team on task, on-brand and more organized. You’ll optimize your time, staff and budget!

What Mistakes Do Marketers Make While Targeting Customers?

Now that we’ve defined target marketing and the various types, it’s time to look at the mistakes that marketers make when approaching segmentation.

Learning about these common mistakes will help you avoid them in your own strategies.

You Don’t Know Your Customers

This mistake will sink your target marketing right from the start. After all, the entire process assumes that you have some idea who your customers are. Then, you take that overarching market and drill down into small categories.

If your initial idea of the customer is flawed, the rest of your resulting targeting marketing will also be inaccurate.

You need to have a detailed, data-driven profile of your ideal customers or target market. It should be backed by concrete evidence from your marketing data, not assumptions or guesswork.

Sometimes when you compare the assumed identity of the target customer with what the data determines is your actual audience, it creates some eye-opening discoveries.

You may have started your company to serve a specific customer image, but that’s not who actually buys and engages with your brand.

You Are Not Engaging With Your Audience Enough

Data will tell you a lot about your customers, especially when it comes to their demographics, locations and even certain behaviors.

However, it will leave many blanks in the customer profile. These need to be filled in by engaging with your audiences!

Utilize email marketing, social media, surveys and other strategies to ask customers direct questions. Their responses will allow you to understand the customers behind the demographics intimately.

While harder to obtain and understand, this is the intangible stuff that will elevate your marketing strategies the most. When you can properly align what you offer with what customers like and believe, it’s a home run.

If you’re already engaging customers with surveys or questionnaires, take a look at what you’re asking. If you haven’t updated these forms, you may be asking questions you already know the answers to.

The bottom line: you won’t understand how to solve your customer’s problems or answer their concerns without interacting with them! The more information you collect on your target market, the stronger your strategies become.

You Aren’t Paying Attention To The Competition

If you operate in a particularly tight space, you need to have a keen eye on the competition at all times.

You won’t be able to garner your audience’s attention if the competition is too thick or just doing a better job at marketing than you.

You need to know what’s going on with their strategies and who they are targeting.

Knowing their strategies will allow you to counter with even better experiences, while knowing who they target allows you to select audience groups with less competition.

There are many questions you want to answer when analyzing the competition:

• Who are their customers? Did this match your audience or is it slightly different?
• Where are they delivering on customer expectations and where are they falling short?
• How many customers do they have? How big is their following?
• What prices do they set for their products/services? How does this compare to your own?
• What is their most valuable marketing asset or trait?
• Are there any valuable audiences that the competition has ignored?

When you know the competition’s target market, you can refine your own to counter. This will allow you to carve your unique space in the market that will lead to hyper-loyal customers.

You Aren’t Analyzing Your Data Enough

Data is your best friend for refining your audience. We’ve already mentioned the need for data-driven segmentation.

If you have existing customers, you have heaps of valuable data that can be used to understand your audience better. You just need the right tools to access it.

Google Analytics is one of the best data tools for marketers. It tracks visitors on your websites and returns valuable data on what pages they viewed, for how long, whether or not they converted and more.

You can use these insights to understand which products, content, offers and other materials resonate the most (and least) with audiences.

Data will also help refine your strategies and dig your business out of any performance rut it may be experiencing. You’ll be able to answer vital questions like:

• Am I targeting the right types of customers?
• Are there enough people in my target market? Are there too many?
• Are my products/services solving the problems of my customers?
• How can I improve my products/services?
• What do I need to change about my business to better appeal to customers?
• What encourages my customers to convert? How can I take advantage of this?

Any time you have one of these important questions on your mind, you should rely on data for an answer.

Data leads to deeper understanding and more streamlined marketing. It’s the more efficient path to seeing the revenue and ROI numbers that you want.

How To Target The Right Audience In Your PPC Campaigns?

Advertising is one of the areas of your marketing strategy that benefits most from refined targeting.

Since these marketing messages have built-in costs, you want to take extra care that you’re only attracting clicks from relevant audiences.

Google Ads and other PPC platforms offer various audience targeting tools that you can use to refine who sees your ads.

Audience Exclusions

This tool is used to remove certain audiences from your targeting. By narrowing your targets, you can create ad content that is more relevant to the smaller group of individuals.

Audience exclusions also help you remove audience demographics that just aren’t relevant to your business. This saves ad dollars and ensures better performance.

In-Market Audiences

In-market audiences are people that are actively searching for products and services like yours. Google uses real-time search data to identify people that are on the verge of converting.

Targeting these audiences with ads will lead to higher conversions. You’re presenting the right offer to customers actively looking for a solution that your company offers.

That’s an easy marketing win!

Customer Match

The customer match feature analyzes past and present data shared by your customers. Then, it looks for similar audience profiles and targets them with your ads.

This system can help you expand your reach by finding new customers that will benefit from your products or share similar interests with your target audience.

Remarketing

Remarketing is the process of targeting past visitors with ads. By re-engaging these individuals, you can encourage them to return and complete a conversion.

Using this method will lead to higher clicks and conversions. You’re targeting people that are already familiar with your business. They may already be a brand-loyal customer! This means it’s far more likely that they’ll engage with your campaign content.

Marketers will blend several of these targeting tools to reach the best audience segments.

“Listening” To Ad Audiences With PPC Signal

One of the challenges with target marketing in PPC campaigns is it’s harder to listen and interact with audiences.

Your ads may generate thousands of impressions, but you have no access to who those individuals are. What stopped them from clicking? If they did click, what prevented them from converting?

That said, you aren’t totally sunk. PPC campaigns produce mountains of data, which provides lots of clues about your targeted audiences.

You need the right tool to listen to that data and analyze it quickly. It’s too large, complex and fast-moving to analyze manually.

PPC Signal is an AI-powered management solution that monitors your campaign data and analyzes it in real-time. Through this analysis, it identifies when significant changes occur and presents them to you.

It’s a bit like having an alert system for your Google Ads account that notifies you when something significant is happening in your data.

By investigating these signals, you can find actionable insights about your audience, competitors and the market as a whole.

It’s the best way to “listen” to your ad audiences.

The Advantages Of Target Marketing With PPC Signal

You can’t achieve the data-driven approach to target marketing without a tool like PPC Signal. Even a small ad account generates many ad interactions that need to be tracked and analyzed.

It’s too much for a marketing team to move on without the help of AI. The sophisticated algorithms that drive PPC Signal can analyze the data from even the most extensive account.

There are several advantages to refining your audience with PPC Signal.

Craft More Relevant Ad Messages

Ad messages need to be extremely compelling to draw those all-important clicks that drive traffic to your website.

Whether you’re using display or search ads, there is a lot of other content and messages on the page that will draw the audience’s attention away from your ads.

You have very little room for error or lackluster copy.

Multiple signals could help you identify problems in your campaigns. For instance, you could filter your active signals to look for decreases or increase in particular metrics.

Conversions are decreasing and cost per conversion is increasing that need to be noticed and taken care on time

This is just one of the many signal types that can provide insight into how campaign is performing.

Better Keyword Targeting

PPC targeting is built on your ability to select the correct keyword targets.

Audiences are constantly changing what and how they search. So, it’s crucial to track the performance of your keywords and refine your targets accordingly.

PPC Signal allows you to filter active alerts by specific keywords.

This will help you track changes to specific keyword targets.

Alternatively, you can filter by keyword-related metrics, like Avg. CPC, clicks and more. Here’s an example of a keyword-related alert.

You can see that the keyword “hublot watches” has a rising CPC value. It’s increased 1,066.7% in just over a week!

Based on this signal, you may decide it’s best to pause this keyword target for the time being. Otherwise, you could be overspending on clicks.

These types of alerts help you refine your keyword targets constantly.

Track Competitor Movements

Spikes in CPC values, as seen in the above example, can be a sign that a new competitor has moved in on your keyword targets.

Tracking these competitor movements is crucial, especially in the hyper-competitive space of advertising. Your competitor strategies will directly impact the performance of your ads.

Once again, PPC Signal comes to the rescue with timely updates on your campaign performance.

By tracking dips in PPC performance, you can detect the warning signs of conflicting competitor strategies.

This information enables you to actively counter these movements and limit competitors’ negative impacts on your own strategies.

Refine Ad Audience Demographics

Google Ads permits you to schedule when and where your ads appear and on which device types.

You have to rely on data to take advantage of these target marketing settings. Data will inform you when your audiences are most likely to interact with ad content and convert. It also tells you where they are located and which device types they use.

PPC Signal offers HoD (hour of day), geo and device filters to keep track of this data.

Applying these filters and looking at changes specific to different locations, times and devices will help you refine your targeting. You’ll better understand your most valuable times, places and devices.

Wrap Up

The advantages of target marketing are clear:

• Better marketing performance results
• Stand out from thick competition
• Drive more brand-loyal customers
• Messages precisely directed at each audience segment
• Stronger product and service offerings
• A more efficient and driven marketing team

You need a data-driven approach to target marketing if you want to make these advantages a reality for your business.

To master your PPC data, you need a tool like PPC Signal. This allows you to efficiently learn what’s making your campaigns perform above or below average.

You can then apply those insights to refine your ad targeting. You’ll learn what ads resonate best with audiences, which locations, times and devices to target, how to select better keywords and more.

Take a look at the PPC Signal demo today.