Although mass marketing is simpler and more applicable to a wider audience, targeted marketing typically produces better results in the long run. This is because targeted marketing allows you to reach a specific and specially selected audience, as opposed to mass marketing’s attempt to just reach as many people as possible. While mass marketing certainly has its uses and advantages, targeted marketing can help your business increase sales and lower your advertising costs. Here are some ways to start using a targeted marketing approach to improve your marketing results:
Identify Your Target Audience
To begin, you must first identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people most likely to be interested in your product or service. This group is further broken down by demographics (age, gender, race, income, etc.), interests, and more. The final segment is your company’s target audience. Once you have a clear picture of your ideal or typical customer, you can then attempt to reach your target audience through social media, search engines, and so on.
Utilize Targeted Advertisements
With your target audience in mind, you can now utilize targeted advertisements on social media or Google. You can use the demographics, interests, location, and other data you collected on your target in order to tailor advertisements specifically to them. It is important to note that if your target audience is older, then social media is likely not the best way to reach them. Instead, print or mail advertisements are a stronger choice. Now that you have a clear picture of who you are selling to, you can better choose the right methods to reach them. This is an important advantage of targeted marketing over mass marketing, because it can help you reduce costs by spending only on platforms where your audience is most active or prevalent.
In addition to social media, you can also tailor content on your business’s website to your target audience. This could include creating a blog meant to inform your target audience about your products or services, or just your company’s industry in general. For example, OTW Safety uses their blog to post informational content about the types of products they produce, including their purpose, options, history of the product’s creation and evolution, and much more. These posts help OTW Safety’s audience select the right product for their needs and help build customer trust.
Perform Ongoing Marketing Research
Finally, it is important to perform ongoing marketing research to make sure you are still targeting the correct audience, identifying new market or consumer trends or challenges, and reoptimizing your content when necessary. Although marketing research is often viewed as an unnecessary expense, it is very important for targeted marketing in order to make sure your demographics are up-to-date, specific, and correct. As your company and offered product lines expands, your target audience will change as well. Not adapting to these changes will set your targeted marketing campaigns up to fail.
Marketing research can also help your company identify new trends to take advantage of. Although online shopping has been increasing in popularity for the past decade, it exploded even more during the pandemic. Marketing research could have identified this trend early on in the pandemic and encouraged businesses to fortify their e-commerce efforts in anticipation of this increase. Research also highlights upcoming challenges, such as a new competitor or rival product also targeting your audience. These insights give your business a head start and allow you to adapt to challenges or opportunities before they occur.
Overall, targeted marketing can increase your business’s sales by focusing on a very specific group of people who are highly interested in your product or service. Capitalizing on this data by using targeted digital advertisements or tailored content, utilizing marketing research to stay ahead of market changes, and reassessing your target audience periodically can help increase your profit over time. Although it might be impractical to completely replace mass marketing with targeted marketing, both methods can be used in combination to achieve impressive results.
