Target marketing is the act of developing campaigns designed to hone in on a specific group of people. If you are a marketer in any capacity, it’s likely that you already know how to do target marketing; but this guide will help you narrow your focus even further. Whether you are attempting to market a business, a product or a service, you will soon learn to find just the group who’s interested and ready to buy. To begin, start thinking about keyword terms you yourself would use to search online for whatever you’re trying to market; as you will use those terms and concepts throughout this target marketing tutorial.
Social Searching
If you’re not sure how to do target marketing, you may be surprised to learn that you’ve probably already engaged in target marketing techniques in the past. Anytime you use the search function offered by Facebook or Twitter, you are essentially looking for a certain type of poster or brand.
For example, if your business sells bars of designer soap, you might search on Twitter for people who have mentioned bars of designer soap in their tweets. It’s the same with Facebook. You are either looking for people who have purchased, and then posted about, bars of soap; or you are looking for soap sellers just like yourself. Why do you want to target market the competition? It’s not so much that you’re going after the competition as you’re going after your competitors’ followers. After all, anyone who provides similar products and services as your company would be target marketing the same group.
Facebook Graph Search
Facebook’s Graph Search offers a great example of how to do target marketing effectively. With Graph Search you can find like-minded people by entering queries consisting of specific targeted variables. For instance, you might search for females who live in New York who like designer soap. You can really narrow down your search with Graph Search and you’ll be able to compile a list of all types of people within your target market.
Online Forums
Take to Google or other search engine and type in one of your keyword terms. Your goal is to find a community message board or forum in the search results. This is where your target market potentially hangs out. Forums and message boards are terrific for target marketing, because you’re essentially able to spy on entire conversations.
If we use our designer soap example, we might search for ‘bought designer soap’ in the search engine in order to find message boards or forums where that exact phrase has been posted. If someone posted a thread containing those keywords and that thread has a lot of posts, you may have found yourself stepping into a virtual goldmine of information.
People love to talk about themselves online, so target marketing becomes pretty easy on a message board; assuming the people who are posting are telling the truth. Find people who are interested in your types of products and services and gauge what they’re saying. Most of all, find out what problems they’re facing. That’s the primary element that you will want to focus on as you learn how to do target marketing like the experts.
Solving Problems
People search for products and services online typically because they’re trying to solve some issue they’re facing. When you begin studying how to do target marketing on message boards and forums, these are the exact conversations you’ll be hoping to find.
“I bought designer soap but I feel it’s too expensive,” one poster might write. This is important data that you can collect for your target marketing research, especially if the poster actually offers up the price of the designer soap he or she purchased. This can not only help you identify a pain point – affordability – but you will also be able to adjust your pricing to accommodate your target marketing audience.
By listening in on conversations that discuss your industry, products and services, you will also want to keep a look out for any brands mentioned. This is your competition. Study your competitors, learn from them and borrow their techniques and improve on them in order to make your target marketing campaigns even better.
Become Involved
Up until this point, you’ve only learned how to do target marketing from an observer’s perspective. Now you are going to learn to be a little more active in your target marketing efforts. If you haven’t already done so, create profiles on all of the social networks and all of the message boards and forums that you have used in your research up until now. Then, just be social.
Do not become an aggressive salesperson and certainly don’t spam everyone with your friend invites. Instead, be casual about your posting and offer only valuable information. Make sure you fill your profiles with information about what you do, as well as a link people can follow to learn more.
Soon, others on the social networks and on the forums will begin to notice you. This is when you will begin to get friend request or at least questions about what you do. Start asking questions, learn about your audience and use your infiltration and the goodwill you’ve established to your advantage by gleaning even more information for your target marketing efforts.
Target Marketing Never Stops
Remember that you are learning how to do target marketing because it will serve you well into the future. It’s not just used for the initial research of your market. It should be used forever in order to tailor your marketing efforts as times and trends change. In other words, target marketing never ceases. The more skills you use and the more you use them, the better and more focused your campaigns will become.
You now have several techniques for finding your target marketing audience. It’s akin to an archer pulling the string back on the bow and letting his arrow fly. Find your online source and engage until you finally hit that Bullseye.
