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Target Marketing Barry Hoffman Wine Consultant

Target Marketing involves breaking a market into segments and than concentrating your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments.

The beauty of target marketing is that:

• It makes the promotion, pricing, and distribution of your products and/or services easier and more cost-effective.
• It provides a focus to all of your marketing activities.

Market segmentation is the process of target marketing. The first step is to do the research that will help you define and zero in on your target market. While market segmentation can be done in many ways, depending on how you want to slice up the pie, three of the most common types are:

1. Geographic segmentation – based on location such as home addresses
2. Demographic segmentation – based on measurable statistics, such as age or income
3. Psychographic segmentation – based on lifestyle preferences, such as being urban dwellers or pet lovers

People purchase products or services for three basic reasons:

1. To satisfy basic needs
2. To solve problems
3. To make themselves feel good

Determine which of those categories your product or service is the solution to, and be prepared to market it accordingly. Your product or service may fit more than one category.

If you are a B2B company you’ll need to consider the types of industries available to you. In addition, you might want to find out how they purchase: seasonally, locally, only in volume, who makes the decision?

For target marketing think of market segments such as:

• Segments that you have sold to in the past, or where you have current customers
• Segments where your product or service might have an edge over your competitors
• Segments which are increasingly developing a need for your services i.e. – Lawyers getting more interested in marketing their services
• Segments where you have a distance advantage over your competitors

Decisions involved with targeting strategy include:

• Which segments to target
• How many products to offer
• Which products to offer in which segments

There are three steps to targeting:

1. Market segmentation
2. Target choice
3. Product positioning

Targeting strategy decisions are influenced by:

• Market Maturity
• Diversity of buyers’ needs and preferences
• Strength of the competition
• Volume of the sales required for profitability

Examples of target marketing in my networking group:

• Our physical trainer offers a specialized exercise program to recovering cancer patients.
• Our naturopath targets parents of children with attention deficit disorder.
• Our computer tech targets businesses with 10 or more computers.