From the course: Digital Marketing Foundations

How to identify your target market

From the course: Digital Marketing Foundations

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How to identify your target market

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- It's no mystery that the success of a business hinges on having customers and in order to have customers, well, you need to find them, in order to find them, you have to message to them and to message to them, well, you have to know them. So if you're marketing without really knowing your customer, stop, the process of finding and knowing your customer is accomplished through customer segmentation. What you're doing is taking your broad target market and breaking it down into smaller groups of people that have a lot in common. Let's say I'm an auto mechanic, now my broad target market is probably anyone that owns a car and is within 15 miles of my shop. But this actually isn't a specific enough segment for me to target to. If we put that audience all in the same room, how similar would they really be? When you have focused customer segments, you are creating audiences that have a lot more in common with one another. So that it's a lot easier to speak to them. Perhaps I specialize in electric vehicles, so I'd likely want a customer segment that contains electric vehicle owners. And I may also segment customers by the type of vehicle they drive or the type of problem, I specialize in solving say, it's transmission issues. Now you can refine your customer segments using a variety of attributes. And these attributes can combine demographics, things like age, education, work type, and income. Geographics, where people are located, psychographics, which includes personality traits, likes, dislikes and even purchase behaviors, and technographics, thinking about the types of devices that they're using. You can also use relevant behavioral attributes to describe your target customer. So you might identify consumers who say buy a cup of coffee every day or those who watch at least three YouTube videos per week. Now there's also needs based. This is an additional approach, which essentially solves for consumers pain point. Take the Nest thermostat, for example, for some it's valuable as a way to reduce their energy usage, for others, it's useful to turn on the heater at a vacation property. And for others, it might be a way to monitor the temperature in a child's room, same product, but with consumers that will receive different messaging based on their need. And you see this play out often with landing pages on a marketing website, a different page for a different segment. This way you can tailor the journey to the shared attributes within one audience. So as you develop your marketing strategy, take your broad target audience and break it down into at least three segments. You can add more segments as you advance in your strategy but if you really want to succeed, you must identify some specific consumer segments.

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