Target Marketing 

Instead of communicating with all of your customers with one broad message, target marketing allows you to focus different messages on different segments.

Market Segmentation 

Your ideal audiences, or market segments, are a combination of geographic, demographic, and psychographic characteristics. Geographic elements address where your audience is located: town, region, local, national, or international. Demographics include somewhat objective aspects: age, gender, income, marital status. For business clients, this might be annual revenue or number of employees. Psychographics take into account lifestyle or values: how does your customer spend his or her time? For business clients, corporate culture might be important.

What characteristics do your best customers have?

Evaluate Before Executing

To execute your strategy, you'll need to review certain aspects of your business and product.

• Do you have the resources available to carry out your strategy, including funds, sales force, and product inventory?
• Do you have a standard or custom product? A custom product will require more explanation from your sales force.
• Have you just introduced your product? Your message may need to be more educational and focused on building awareness than a product that customers are familiar with.
• What's happening in the marketplace? Be aware of what your competitors are doing, and what economic conditions may affect the success of your product.

Reaching Your Customers

When initiating your strategy, be sure your list includes only those people or businesses that fit your criteria for a specific offer or message. It's the most important element because it doesn't matter how great your offer is if you aren't reaching the right people.

The next step is to be sure your communication mode is appropriate for your audience. Are you placing an ad, sending an email, or mailing a letter? No matter how you send it, your message should be focused, relevant and meaningful, and consistent with your branding.

Before you start evaluating your efforts, allow enough time for responses to roll in. These may include increased calls, visits to your website, or traffic in your store. In order to measure the effectiveness, try to include some type of code on your correspondence.

Tracking or coding allows you to analyze who responded to each of your marketing efforts, whether it was a letter, an email, or an ad. Once you've reviewed the responses, you're able to refine your list for your next effort to include only those people who match the characteristics of the responders.