What You Need Before You Start Target Marketing?

Using targeting in marketing serves both customers and brands. It improves product development and operations, and it allows a brand to differentiate itself, stand out, and make a bigger impact. But before you start target marketing, you need something important.

A buyer persona is a description of a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer. It is a detailed summary of the characteristics, qualities, and habits of a person who is in your target audience.

Knowing your ideal audience helps you decide which target markets to focus on. When you deeply know your ideal customer, you can identify ways to segment them into a more defined audience.
To create a buyer persona, you need to imagine your ideal customer and describe their:

  • Demographics
  • Professional roles
  • Values and goals
  • Challenges
  • Sources of influence
  • Buying decisions

For help with creating audience personas, use Alexa’s free buyer persona template to build a complete description of your ideal customer.

As you create a buyer persona, don’t guess at the details that describe your ideal target customer. To be successful at targeting in marketing, use real data and facts to form your buyer persona. Perform research to learn about your ideal customers.

  • Conduct interviews with your former and current customers.
  • Talk to your sales team and find out what trends they see and experience.
  • Track data on your point of sale systems and web analytics.
  • Engage in social listening on social media to see what conversations customers have about your brand and industry.

Use Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool to see what websites your audience visits. Enter your site or up to 10 competitors in the Audience Overlap Tool to produce a map of sites that all share a similar audience. This information allows you see what other websites your target audience visits and helps you understand where they get information, inspiration, products, and services.

Use Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool to uncover audience interests. When you know what other sites your audience visits, you can also learn more about them. You can make educated assumptions about who they are and what interests they have by looking closely at the other sites they use. For example, using the similar websites map for daydesigner.com, you can see that audiences also visit intentionalmoms.com and momssmallvictories.com. Therefore, you can determine that the audience includes mothers. (This information can also help you identify an opportunity for a target market: moms who use day planners.)

While using the tool, if you aren’t sure what a website is about based on the URL, click on the site. From there, you can visit the site or use other Alexa tools to get more information as it relates to the site’s keywords, backlinks, and traffic.

Use Alexa’s Site Overview Tool to see audience demographics. To get an idea of who is using a website, enter your site or one of your competitors into the Site Overview Tool. The report will provide insights into the gender, education, income, age, and ethnicity of the target website’s audience, helping you identify key characteristics about readers.

How to Identify Target Market Opportunities

A detailed buyer persona is essential for helping you identify ways to use targeting in marketing and drill down into a more specific niche market. Here are two other tactics that help you identify opportunities within target markets.

Use Alexa’s Site Keywords Tool to look for trends. Enter your site or a site of a competitor into Alexa’s Site Keywords Tool to produce a report on the top keywords that send the most search traffic to the target site. Seeing what terms audiences use can give you inspiration for target marketing. For example, daydesigner.com might see that many people are searching for “printables” and “PDF” and then decide to create a niche market for downloadable calendars.

Use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool to see what industry terms your audience uses. This tool helps you see what trends are related to your products and offerings. Enter a phrase closely related to your business into the Keyword Difficulty Tool. Use the report to look for trends that show a need in the market. Daydesigner.com, for example, could see that people are searching for “academic” and “teacher” planners and may identify an education market it could tap into.

How to Use Target Marketing to Improve Your Strategy

Now that you know what you need to create a buyer persona and identify opportunities for targeting in marketing, let’s look at how you can execute strategies based on this information. Here are a few marketing targeting examples and channels your brand can improve.

Marketing Communication: Improve your marketing messages by using the language your audience uses. When you intimately know your audience, you know the right ways to write content for a website, create copy for social media posts, and use words that connect and resonate with your audience.

Content Marketing: Produce more valuable, targeted content by focusing on your audience’s unique interests and needs. Instead of creating generic blog posts, e-books, and infographics that your audience won’t notice, improve your content marketing efforts by developing content that targets their specific desires, fears, and wants.

Learn more: How to Use Content Mapping to Create Effective Content

SEO: Improve the likelihood your ideal audience will find your brand via search by optimizing your content for the best keywords your audience searches for. Targeting in marketing helps you identify the phrases and words your audience uses so you can target those terms and drive traffic back to your website.

Learn more: How to Do Keyword Research: A Comprehensive Guide

Paid Search: Also drive more traffic to your website by targeting the right keywords through paid search. Focus on the buyer keywords you have identified through your research to catch your target audience at the time they are ready to purchase.

Learn more: What Is SEM? A Guide to Paid Search Engine Marketing

Email: Use targeting in marketing to send emails to the right people, at the right time, with the right content for their stage of the purchase funnel. Using what you know about your customer, outline their buying decision process, and identify the places where you can use email to guide them through their journey.

Display Ads: Use your knowledge of your audience to identify sites where you should place display ads. You can make sure your ads are only in places where your audience will see them by choosing to advertise on the sites you know they visit.

Guest Blogging: Also catch attention on other sites by guest posting on sites you know your ideal audience visits. Use what you know about your audience to find strategic guest blogging opportunities that will put your brand in front of your target customers.

Learn more: Guest Posting: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Started

Improve Your Targeting in Marketing Plans Today

Targeting in marketing serves brands and consumers. It improves marketing strategies and audience experiences, builds brand awareness and loyalty, and even leads to better products and services. Plus, target marketing makes it easier for brands to reach audiences in an authentic, more meaningful and personal way.

So if you’re struggling to stand out in a sea of similar products and services, try using this tactic to grow your business and connect with more customers.

And get help with launching your target marketing strategies by signing up for a free trial of Alexa’s Advanced Plan. The plan includes the market and audience research tools mentioned in this post along with more than a dozen tools to improve your upcoming marketing, SEO, and content plans