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


Published: | By Paul Aroloye

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 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.

Targeted marketing allows you to reach consumers who want to use your products and services. For example, with the Koala Inspector, you can discover the winning formula for your dropshipping e-commerce store.

You can create targeted sales by analyzing any Shopify store in just one click: find the best products, pricing, site traffic, ad campaigns, themes, plugins, and more.

Koala will help you discover the features of that store that are performing the best and thus mitigate the risk of trying out new dropshipping products.

This doesn't necessarily mean your target audience will be your only consumers. It just means 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 whom 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.

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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 ways, including various advertisements.

The main point 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 whom the marketer has in mind for the product, which means the marketer would be going for consumers 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 specific household; the point is to reach people who will be highly beneficial to the overall growth of your business.

Targeted marketing consists of looking at your current customer base; you need to evaluate the more appealing audience to your business and then market your services to speak to the audience you are trying to reach.

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

Four target marketing strategies are sure to help with the entire process: mass marketing, segmented marketing, concentrated marketing, and micro marketing.

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.

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

The Good: Highly Beneficial (High ROI)

Targeted marketing allows marketers 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 regarding 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 because they enjoy products and services made or tailored with them in mind; improvements to these products and services will also result from direct feedback 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, which means that your advert will also be targeted to that audience.

This means your message must 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 your message will be more precise 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 many 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 consumers.

3 Benefits of Target Marketing

  1. Increase in sales
  2. Sustains relationships
  3. Narrow your audience

 

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 they'll receive it better, leading 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 narrowing down your audience, you don't have to try to reach an entire population; you can narrow it down to a subset of the people that will help your product even more effectively.

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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 will follow a specific due process that might take a long while to go and could lead to much 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 spend a lot more reevaluating your audience.

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

We live in a world where every single message could be politically incorrect; for example, if 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, 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 time because you must study what they like and respond positively. If you pass across a message 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 many other brands may offer the same goods and services to the same target audience you are offering yours to.

The bitter truth is that 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 must do due diligence by researching their target audience, collecting data, and researching what they will and won't like. If possible, you could also open the lines of communication to get their feedback. 

When conducting technology due diligence, it is important to analyze the target company's marketing strategies to determine the effectiveness and potential risks of their targeted marketing approach.

Using a due diligence data room is one of the greatest methods to guarantee that you’re using the right data room. You may want to test the platform before committing, and a free trial allows you to do so.

Many users face difficulties deciding which virtual data room software to use due to the lack of understanding of what they need from an online data room service.

Electronic data rooms were designed to facilitate due diligence and negotiations during the mergers and acquisitions m&a data room process. However, the needs of the modern business world have outgrown the capabilities of the original VDRs. The modern dataroom demands functionality and security for document management that only complex systems can provide.

Data room software can greatly enhance the security and effectiveness of targeted marketing by providing a secure and organized platform for sharing sensitive information with potential customers or partners.

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 or secondary data, which could help them develop marketing strategies that will surely be helpful to their business.

3 Ways POWR Can Help Your Target Marketing Goals

  1. Popups
  2. Form Builder
  3. Countdown Timer

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

1. Popups

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

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

2. 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 improve your retargeting campaign because now you have more information about your target audience.

3. 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 audiences, 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 disadvantages.

This works in cases where the product or service is appealing to the general public; 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 groups or members of society only use certain products, and without targeted marketing to sell a particular brand to a specific audience, everything would be a bit uneven.

The whole point of targeted marketing is creating ads that speak directly to the consumer. If there weren't target marketing, you would only have Ads that say 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 advantages for 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; without it, there would be many setbacks in the marketing world.


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.

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