Target Marketing For Dollars
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By: Toni Grundstrom

The biggest challenge in marketing is to identify those people
who need your services and are willing to pay your prices to
receive them. Target marketing allows you to send a specific
message to your chosen niche, personalizing your message to
satisfy their unique needs.

For your marketing to be cost effective you need to pick a
target audience, or niche, to focus on. Every person is not
going to be interested in your product/service so your marketing
dollars are better spent on those with common needs and interests.
By marketing to your target audience, who already has a need for
your services, you immediately increase your marketing campaign's
likelihood of success.

Narrowing Your Focus

Who are your existing customers and what common denominators do they share? Your goal should be to focus on locating more individuals that have those same common denominators. There are several ways to narrow down your target audience.

1) Demographics - Focus on a particular characteristic of people. These can include their career, a hobby or interest, their income level, age, marital status, etc. Collect information about the people themselves.
2) Geographical area - Focus in on a particular neighborhood, community, or geographic area. How far does your product/service cover? If you sell your product online demographics can include rural, urban, state, country, or even P.O. Box.

Benefits of Segmenting a Target Audience

Increased marketing results. You will be able to focus your message to address the unique needs of your niche. This means addressing their common issues and explaining specifically how you can help them with that issue.

Decreased marketing cost. Targeting your audience means you have a good idea of where to advertise. You can use the smaller publications rather than expensive mass media. Your niche is focused and smaller so fewer direct mail pieces need to be sent. You can also afford to send out multiple mail pieces to create frequency to get your audience to remember you.

When one message is sent to any and everyone you can't tell them exactly what they need to hear. Your marketing piece will fall on "deaf ear" because each person has different motivations for buying, personal needs, professional needs, wants, goals, and the like. What is an effective sales piece to one person may be a complete turn off to another.

The goal of your marketing is to get into the heads of your prospects and figure out their needs, issues and motivations. Why do they want or need to buy your product/service and are there any objections and concerns you need to overcome for them to purchase from you? The only way to do that is to focus on your niche. If your general message read, "I am the best person to help buy/sell your house" your message will not even be noticed. Compare that to “I'll help you .find your new house and give you a tour of the schools, stores – your neighborhood. Let’s make your new house your home.”

Send to homeowners with school aged children and they will identify and read the rest of your message.

It may be necessary to create various sets of your niche to target different segments. However, to do so, you need different sets of marketing materials focusing on the needs/wants of each of your different segments.

Now that you have completed your target marketing and identified your niche you should look at its size. How big your target audience is depends on your marketing budget and how much income you want to generate. To do this, calculate:

-Your target revenue goal.
-Your average sales/customer.
-How many sales do you need to reach that goal? (Target income/ avg. sales per client)
-How many prospects there are in your target audience?
-How many current clients do you have in that segment?
-What is your market penetration? (# of current clients / # of prospects in area)

Once you have those numbers you can determine if your target audience will bring in your revenue goal. Refer to your marketing plan to ensure your market research has selected the correct niche/audience and your message will satisfy their unique needs. The more specific you are about your target audience the better your chances for a successful marketing campaign.