Before starting a marketing campaign, it is important that you first identify your target market.

• Start by determining why a customer would want to buy your product/service.
• A thorough collection of market intelligence and research is required to identify quantitative and qualitative patterns.
• Next, segment your general market.

The process of identifying a target market is called market segmentation. This is important because once you identify a niche through targeting, you can focus your efforts on targeted marketing to attract a specific group of consumers.

Why is segmentation so important?

In marketing, it is not uncommon to have a target market that is comprised of several different demographic groups of people that can be profiled into several different consumer groups. For example, a few years ago I had a client that was an online division of a large regional bank. His goal was to attract new customers to the bank and get existing customers to open additional accounts. If I had a savings account, I would have been encouraged to open a checking account and maybe a CD as well.

As you could probably imagine, the target market for the online bank was quite a large group. Their identified market was segmented into 5 consumer profiles. These segments were based on age and income. This meant that there were five different sets of marketing materials for any one campaign. While the overall message may have been the same, the copy and images were different depending on who would receive the material.

Market intelligence

Market research to gain intelligence on your consumers is vital to pinpoint who you are targeting and what would be the best marketing strategy to reach them. The market research collection process includes employing various techniques to collect, analyze, and report data on groups of potential consumers.

Segmentation

After gathering the necessary market intelligence, you can devise the best strategy to customize your advertising and promotional efforts to achieve the desired result. Campaign planning should include test market groups and test campaigns. This is key not only to long-term marketing success, but also to making it as profitable as possible. In test programs, the marketer must be able to identify which efforts will be successful and revise the strategy to better reach each group of consumers.