What is Target Marketing? The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Targeted marketing is a direct way of getting products and services known by the target audience for which they were created; targeted marketing is the top-notch magic trick that every business owner needs.

The trick is to use targeted marketing if you intend to grow any business. It raises awareness of what you're selling or offering to the right people or the right group of people who need your products and services.

Using targeted marketing allows you to reach consumers that will specifically want to make use of your products and services.

This doesn't necessarily mean that your target audience will be your only consumers. It just means that they are a more specific group among the total number of consumers you could potentially have.

Targeted marketing is not only another type of marketing strategy. It is also very effective in getting products and services to the right people, or the selected audience type, this kind of marketing raises awareness through advertising tools such as billboards ads, the main aim of this type of marketing is to reach the 'who' when it comes to a product.

For example, you could have a billboard advert about an alcoholic beverage of some sort, the billboard in question will have to define who this product is targeted at, and there would also be a direct personalized message, like a one-liner, addressed to the target audience.

In this case, it could be a particular group or subset of people, specifically the male gender.

What is Targeted Marketing?

Targeted marketing is an effective strategy used by businesses to increase sales. They do this by reaching their target audience in different types of ways that could include various kinds of advertisements.

The main point of this is to raise awareness of a service or product. Targeted marketing is a straightforward approach to increasing sales by raising awareness for a service or product among a particular group of people or a target audience part of an even more significant total market audience.

The targeted audience depends on who the marketer has in mind for the product, which means the marketer would be going for consumers who are more likely to use the product or service. Thus, the target audience is a subset of the total number of potential customers.

The target audience could be a particular age group, gender, profession, business, or even particular households; the point is to reach people who will be highly beneficial to the overall growth of your business.

Targeted marketing consists of taking a good look at your current customer base; you need to evaluate the audience that is more appealing to your business and then market your services in a way that will speak to the audience you are trying to reach.

Part of target marketing also involves choosing a particular demographic to target, and you have to start by evaluating your product and deciding what demographic out of an entire population will be drawn to what you're trying to market.

Four target marketing strategies are sure to help when it comes to the entire process, and there's mass marketing, segmented marketing, concentrated marketing, and micromarketing.

These various strategies serve as a way of deciding what your customer base will be.

It helps you decide how broadly or even narrowly you would like to market to your selected consumers.

In the end, the choice highly determines how successful the brand will be. In the end, you will have to choose a segment of the population that aligns with your product so that the segment you choose will help your business grow.

The Good: Highly Beneficial (High ROI)

Targeted marketing provides marketers with a way to get their brands, products, and services on the top of the marketing food chain. When it comes to target marketing, the marketer finds a way to reach a particular set of audiences, which will be highly beneficial to the business.

Targeted marketing provides marketers with effective results when it comes to performance in sales and returns; they also make your brand stand out and away from all the other competitors in the general market.

Targeted marketing is also great for the target audience in particular because they get to enjoy products and services that have been made or tailored with them in mind, improvements to this products and services will also be as a result of the direct feedback gotten from the target audience.

The benefit of targeted marketing could be evident in the message of an Ad or a copy if you have a targeted audience, and this means that your advert will also be targeted to that audience in particular.

What this means is that your message will have to speak directly to the category of people you have grouped as your target audience.

For example, you could be marketing particular products that are only exclusive to women. In this case, your copywriting or Ad will have a message directed to just women and not men and women, this helps you narrow down your target audience, and also your message will be clearer and concise.

Targeting marketing will rely heavily on having a driven marketing team to make the most of the marketing.

In general, having a target audience takes the edge off. Focusing on only a particular subset of people will make the marketer's jobs way more accessible and even fun.

Targeted marketing has a lot of benefits, there are many ways in which it serves the whole world, and there are many ways in which it would be good for not just brands and marketers but also the consumers.

3 Benefits of Target Marketing

1. Increase in Sales

The thing about targeting a particular audience type is that your message is more precise, catchier, and more appealing to the audience you're trying to reach. This means that they'll receive it better, which could lead to more sales of your goods and services.

2. Sustains Relationships

The thing about target marketing is that it paves a relationship between brands and their clients, which also has a way of building trust.

3. Narrow your Audience

When it comes to narrowing down your audience, you don't have to try to reach an entire population when you can narrow it down to a subset of the population that will help your product even more effectively.

The Bad: Misrepresentation and Time Consumption

The plain truth is that target marketing can be time-consuming; the evaluation of the brand and the target audience to go for will follow a specific due process that might take a long while to go that could lead to a lot of time spent just deciding the target audience to go for.

The next thing you'll have to worry about is a misrepresentation, or you could even go as far as stereotyping the group of people you have selected as your target audience. When that happens, you'll find yourself spending a lot more to reevaluate your audience.

When you spend a lot of time figuring out your target audience, you should equally make sure you weigh all your options regarding the kind of message your copy will contain.

We live in a world where every single message could be politically incorrect, for example; you're marketing a particular lipstick or makeup brand to a target audience that is classified normatively as women in today's day and age, and your message will have to be inclusive to other gender-fluid persons who might take offense to be left out.

Misrepresentation of your target audience is highly possible. Evaluating the audience takes a lot of time because you have to study what they like and respond positively to. If you pass across a message that they don't relate to or don't understand, that will affect your brand negatively.

This misrepresentation could also lead to an unhealthy omission of some of your target audience if you're advertising a product mainly used by men and a small population of women; you have to be careful not to omit women when it comes to that product altogether.

It should be inclusive in a way that isn't obvious.

The Ugly: Stiff Competition

The thing about any marketing at all is that you're bound to run into one kind of competition or the other, in some cases, competition could be very high, and you will have no breathing space to relax after all the work is done, this is because the work is never really done.

When it comes to target marketing, you'll have to note that there are possibly many other brands out there offering the same goods and services to the same target audience you are offering yours to.

The bitter truth is, if you don't know your target audience well enough, you won't be able to please them, and they will quickly run off to the next brand that knows them better and can deliver better.

If one brand fails a particular demographic, that demographic won't just sit around and wait for the brand to improve, they will move on to the next one because there is always another competitor at the corner waiting to take away your client base.

This is why marketers need to do due diligence by researching their target audience, collecting data, and researching what they will like and what they won't like. If possible, you could also open the lines of communication to get feedback from them.

This will help you improve the products and services in every area that needs improvement.

Companies and brand owners are expected to collect research on their customers. These data could either be primary data or secondary data, and it could help them develop marketing strategies that will surely be helpful to their business.

How POWR helps you in your Target Marketing Goals?

POWR has some really useful plugin that aids target marketing. These plugins help you capture hot leads from engaging website visitors, gather feedback on products and services and help you display offers to boost sales.

1. POWR Popup

POWR Popup helps you collect emails from website visitors. You can create different types of popups without having any code knowledge.

These popups can help you 10x your sales, collect more emails with it’s exit-intent technology, remind customers of their abandoned cart which drives even more sales and increases the overall sales conversions on your website.

2. POWR Form Builder

POWR Form Builder helps you build beautiful forms on your website to collect feedback from existing customers or clients. This data can be repurposed to make your retargeting campaign better because now you have more information about your target audience.

3. POWR Countdown Timer

POWR Countdown Timer helps you reduce sales time, boost sales and reduces bounce rate by creating a sense of urgency for your website visitors. You can show different countdowns to different target audience which makes this tool very powerful.

What Would A World Without Targeted Marketing Look Like?

Without targeted marketing, brands would have to do what is called undifferentiated marketing or mass marketing. This is where they would treat everyone as a potential customer.

In a way, this could be beneficial, but it will also come with some sets of disadvantages.

This works in cases where the product or service is something that is appealing to the general public, this means there will be no need to have a target audience since everyone is potentially a product consumer.

Target marketing is highly beneficial in cases where the general public isn't a potential client in any way, certain products are only used by certain groups or members of the society, and without targeted marketing to sell a particular brand to a particular audience, and everything would be a bit uneven.

The whole point of targeted marketing is to create Ads that speak directly to the consumer. If there weren't target marketing, you would only have Ads that speak to everyone in a way that would seem like the Ad is speaking to no one in particular.

Targeted marketing is here to stay because it has many benefits and many advantages when it comes to the subset of an entire population. It is also safe to say that targeted marketing is also very digital.

The internet works based on targeted marketing, and without it, there would be a lot of setbacks in the marketing world as a whole.

Author Bio

Paul Aroloye is the founder of PaulAroloye.com. He simplifies SEO for online entrepreneurs and businesses, helping them 10x their organic reach with their websites/blogs and YouTube channels. You can connect with him here.