How to Target Customers?
This article explores strategies for identifying and attracting the audience most likely to be interested in your products or services. Target customers is a process that involves an in-depth understanding of the requirements, wants and behaviors of potential customers. By taking a targeted approach, businesses can focus their resources more efficiently, increasing the ROI of their marketing campaigns. The article emphasizes the importance of data analysis and market segmentation. These tools make it possible to define ideal customer profiles.
SUMMARY
1- What is customer targeting?
2- Definition of market segmentation
3- How to target your customers with personae?
To create or take over a business, you must identify your target, which is made up of customers and prospects (potential customers). To achieve this, you will rely on segmentation and personae, which will then allow you to guide the positioning of your marketing strategy.
What is Customer Targeting?
Identifying your target customers should be one of your major concerns during market research. Indeed, a consumer’s act of purchasing is based on one of the following two levers: the response to a need or the resolution of a problem. So, if you think that your products or services are for everyone, you are wrong! On the contrary, you must define the range of customers targeted by your goods or services in order to properly direct your marketing actions and not disperse your efforts.
Customer targeting, therefore, consists of identifying groups of customers whose needs correspond to your products and services, based in particular on market segmentation. Thus, you will avoid focusing on segments with low profitability potential or engaging in advertising or emailing campaigns that would hit the mark. Keep in mind that you are pursuing two objectives: attracting and retaining your target customers to ensure the sustainability of your activity.
Why Should You Target Customers?
For a long time, marketing strategy has focused on the qualities of products and services. Clearly, the company managed its advertising in such a way as to push its product towards the marketing target by highlighting its differentiation criteria and by undertaking massive communication campaigns aimed at the greatest number of people.
Today, marketing has transformed and aims to focus on the target audience, their problems and their needs. Marketers no longer seek to push a product/service but to attract a customer to your business; this is what we call inbound marketing. This is based, in particular, on personalized advertisements carried out on the social media used by your target customers.
Why this change of direction? Because inbound offers a better conversion rate, faster return on investment and positive customer feedback. Which will in turn bring in new customers, in particular by posting their opinions on social networks. Customer knowledge through Big data, customer data and AI is therefore essential to properly target your audiences and adapt your marketing campaigns.
Why Target Market Segmentation?
As you can see, companies focus on the customers they are most likely to satisfy. Targeting customers base is one of the key marketing strategies to guarantee commercial success via a match between digital marketing and purchasing motivations. The loyalty of your target customers is at stake! The first step to defining targets is marketing segmentation.
Segmentation divides the market into groups or segments with common characteristics. The defined segment(s) represent(s) the target on which to focus. These segments must be exploitable, measurable, accessible and profitable.
Definition of Market Segmentation
A market segment is a group whose individuals who compose it have similar characteristics and for whom the commercial offer is substantially the same. You must choose to position yourself in a segment based on the results of the different types of criteria that you will study. Individuals who meet these different criteria will constitute your target customers.
To do this, you must divide market segments into distinct and homogeneous sub-segments. Each sub-segment groups together similar prospect profiles, based on socio-economic criteria (socio-economic segmentation), demographic criteria (demographic segmentation), geographic criteria (geographic segmentation) and behavioral criteria (behavioral segmentation).
Segmentation Criteria
To segment and choose a target, we analyze the panel according to different criteria:
Socio-economic criteria: They concern profession, socio-professional category (CSP) and income level;
Sociodemographic criteria: They focus on age, sex, family status and other more specific variables (level of education, pace of life, etc.);
Geographic criteria: You define your target customer or prospect in relation to their place of residence, work or leisure activities;
Behavioral criteria: They are based on activities, opinions or even consumption habits. You can choose to use only one of these criteria or several.
Choose One Or More Segments Based on Your Products and Services
Among all the segments identified, it is appropriate to choose the one or those that best match the needs of the product or service to be sold. To become a target profile, the customer segment must be:
Measurable: It must be clearly and easily identifiable in relation to the characteristics of the customers who make it up and roughly quantifiable;
Accessible: Communicating with this segment through means of communication and distribution channels must be possible;
Exploitable: The company must be able to establish itself in the market against its competitors and evaluate the barriers to entry to know if they are surmountable;
Profitable: This involves considering the level of sales and profits achievable and the growth opportunities offered by this segment.
How to Target Customers with Personae?
You can create a standard profile that brings together the ideal characteristics of your product or service: the “persona”. This is the “ideal customer” or “archetype”. The idea is that this persona considers the product or service completely suitable and buys it without hesitation. This is your core target for which you will identify the needs but also the possible objections. If necessary, several personae can be used for the same development project.
Building a Persona
In practice, these personas are built from data and facts. They are endowed with social and psychological characteristics. We can give them a first and last name to humanize them. Using the same process as segmentation, identify them among the population by giving them an age, place of residence, profession, family and economic situation and living environment. Finally, you can attribute certain tastes, lifestyle habits and character traits to them.
Ideally, these personas are built from customer data collected as close as possible to the source, by collecting testimonials in relation to your project, but also thanks to indirect sources such as sector study reports, scientific publications or any other document that can participate in their construction.
In the absence of time or resources, it is possible to build them from supposed behaviors and goals, the main thing is to keep in mind a realistic and complete design.
Example of a Marketing Persona
To establish targets based on a persona, you must draw up a robot portrait. Let’s say you want to sell natural SEO services to B2B professionals. To develop the avatar of your target type, you will tell a story about them. Your typical profile is as follows:
1- A 30 year old man;
2- He has just created his business;
3- He lives in the Paris region;
4- He’s with someone;
5- His business generates a monthly turnover of €10,000;
6- He is quite extroverted;
7- It seeks to position itself in the niche market of turnkey rental investment;
8- He doesn’t have much knowledge about natural referencing.
9- Once your persona has been established, you can move on to prospecting, which involves appropriate marketing positioning.
How To Define Your Marketing Positioning Based On Your Target Customer?
Targeting customers finally allows you to determine your positioning. Indeed, targeting and personalizing your customers has allowed you to identify their real needs. Once you know everything about them, you still have to adapt your communication! It would be a shame to identify and target a high-potential clientele and miss out because you will not have refined your positioning.
How to Define Your Marketing Positioning?
Quite simply by referring to the results you obtained at the segmentation criteria stage. They allow you to sort and refine your target customers. The smaller your target, the more your marketing strategy (marketing mix) will need to be adapted to this particular target. Conversely, a more global target requires remaining more general to suit the greatest number of people. Concretely, two choices are available to you:
Positioning on Differentiated Marketing:
A product is aimed at one segment and one segment only.
,:
The product you offer is aimed at several segments, but you will make sure to adapt your communication according to each. For example, you will not use the same channels to reach adults and children to whom you want to sell electric scooters to target customers!
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