If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re selling to nobody.
Such a deep quote, I know, my genius is almost frightening sometimes. But seriously, if you’re building a business, you have to get one thing right early on:
Who exactly are you selling to — and how do you reach them?
That’s where targeting in marketing comes in.
If you don’t get granular on the EXACT person you’re trying to help… you’ll be shouting into the void, and you’ll burn through all of your hard-earned dollars.
Sadly, I can’t give you a one-size-fits-all approach for targeting.
Startups, solo founders, and growing teams often need to switch strategies as they scale — and that’s completely normal.
But I’ll do my best to break down what targeting in marketing really means, unpack the four main targeting strategies, and show you when to use each one depending on your stage of growth.
Market targeting starts with evaluating and defining your target market, typically along the four targeting dimensions that marketing professionals usually cite.
These include:
A Forbes study found that “the primary challenge for audience targeting is identifying the proper personas”. Using targeting criteria right, you should be able to obtain a clear-cut definition of your target market.
Market targeting is about taking these four dimensions to define your target market, and developing strategies necessary to reach your chosen market segment efficiently and effectively.
The types of targeting strategies you use will rely on the type of product you want to bring to the market, while the criteria necessary to define your target market will strongly depend on what kind of target audience you have in mind. In other words, different strategies are needed for different products and services and the ideal customers you are targeting, which should mirror your targeting criteria. In the following, we take a closer look at the four different types of targeting strategies in marketing.
Let’s briefly define the four types of targeting strategies before taking a deeper dive into the advantages, disadvantages, and use cases of each one below.
Undifferentiated marketing is a strategy that makes essentially no priority between target market segments. This means the entire mass of the market is perceived to be the target customer, and the goal of these campaigns is to reach as many potential customers as possible.
Mass marketing strategies involve a single message that generally resonates with everyone. This type of targeting strategy is commonly deployed by brands and industries that can be thought of as supplying essential products and services or are widely consumed.
Examples of industries that partake in undifferentiated marketing are:
Companies like Crest and Colgate use nearly identical ingredients, have nearly identical selling points and offer nearly identical flavoring. Due to this, the best strategy to differentiate themselves from the overall market for a standard toothpaste option is undifferentiated marketing. The company that reaches the most people most efficiently will drive better sales and profits.
Common distribution channels for mass marketing strategies are:
What are the benefits of mass market targeting?
What are the drawbacks of mass market targeting?
Segmented marketing is more or less the opposite of undifferentiated marketing. Instead of targeting the masses, this type of targeting strategy prioritizes segments of your target audience.
What makes differentiated marketing successful is the ability to reach the people who are most likely to purchase your product or service with messages unique to each segment.
Another key benefit from differentiated marketing is the ability to leverage unique selling points or core products that focus on the aspects of your product/service that best serves each individual.
You can easily see that differentiated marketing is a very powerful strategy and one of the targeting strategies used most in marketing.
For example, an environmentally friendly and sustainable clothing brand could segment its product to advertise specifically to customers who care about different benefits. One t-shirt manufacturer could target people who prioritize organically made ingredients, while another could target the softness of the materials, and another could target the greenhouse gases that weren’t created compared to other fast-fashion branded shirts. This could be targeted further from here, such as male and female, fans of shirt styles, colors, etc.
What are the advantages of differentiated marketing?
What is the main disadvantage of segmented marketing?
Differentiated marketing strategies can be quite costly. It requires significantly more money and work, constant management and changes as well as lots of targeted market research.
Concentrated marketing targets a small subset of a larger market. This strategy is commonly used by businesses that have a strong unique selling proposition that attracts a specific type of customer.
These niches could also be focused on segments defined along demographic, geographic, behavioral or psychological dimensions. Niche marketing also takes advantage of very few marketing channels such as Facebook groups, Tik Tok followers of individuals/accounts, or visitors of a specific website.
A good example of this comes from a study published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing regarding targeting marketing efforts towards Millennials. They found that “there are digital marketing strategies that are considerably more effective in grabbing the attention of Millennials, motivating repeat visits to a web site, and encouraging Millennials to write online reviews.”
By concentrating on specific avenues and distribution channels, the finding concluded that they could drastically increase website traffic and reviews.
Major advantages of concentrated market targeting are the ability to target a loyal and focused customer base as well as facing less competition. The major disadvantages of concentrated marketing are smaller markets and fewer growth opportunities.
What are the other benefits of concentrated marketing strategies?
The last type of targeting strategy in marketing is micromarketing, and it is probably the least frequently applied one. A micromarketing strategy targets individuals or small groups within a niche market. We often call this targeting strategy individual marketing. It can be so highly targeted (or re-targeted) that each campaign is directed towards only one person. Micromarketing techniques can take small niches and more strongly define your targets by specific segments such as age or location.
Using the 4 examples above from niche marketing, we could create more highly targeted markets that fall into a micromarket targeting:
Local marketing can also be considered a section of micromarketing when the locale is highly specific to small areas such as neighborhoods or even specific streets or places.
An example of this could be a small local coffee shop that only targets people in their neighborhood where customers visit by walking past. This is beneficial instead of spending resources marketing to other locations where many competitors are situated between your location and the customers’ starting point.
Micromarketing is often deployed by businesses towards their most loyal customers, commonly seen through targeted email campaigns. Services and storefronts also tend to rely on micromarketing in specific regions or to fit the unique needs of a customer base.
What are the benefits of micromarket targeting?
What are the drawbacks of micromarket targeting?
Marketers are consistently testing and innovating campaign strategies with different goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). A combination of targeting strategies is often required. A brand awareness campaign may be more effective for an individual company using a concentrated marketing strategy, but that company may want to use a micromarketing target strategy for a unique product offering. Understanding the differences between these types of targeting strategies used in marketing is critical to develop highly effective marketing campaigns.
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