4 Tips for Target Group-Oriented Marketing
How to make your next campaign a success
Zero-waste marketing – the dream of every advertising professional! But how can we minimise wastage? An important success factor is the identification of relevant target groups and marketing that is directed accordingly. The following tips should help to optimise campaigns and ensure that they are as successful as possible.
posted by Yasmin Yiu
1. Define your target group
The first task is to define who the product is aimed at. Is it supposed to appeal to younger or older people, what are their interests, how do they move both online and offline, and how do they make purchase decisions? Market analysis can be helpful in determining the answers. It also makes sense to take a close look at previous campaigns and analyse where most of the clicks came from and when clicks led to purchases (and when they didn’t). For example, if this kind of evaluation reveals that the campaign is being directed at men and women in the 18-65+ age group throughout Germany, but that relevant clicks and purchases only come from women in the 30-45 age group living in North Rhine-Westphalia, that’s a good first lesson. And it can be applied directly to the next similar campaign by narrowing the audience accordingly. It can therefore come down to being brave enough to leave gaps – sometimes less is more.
2. Buyer Personas
Sociodemographic information plays a major role in target group-oriented marketing. This includes age, gender, location, marital status, education, occupation, interests and hobbies, as well as values and ideals. In order to correctly assess your own target group, it can be helpful to create a buyer persona. In contrast to a target group, a buyer persona has an actual face. It is a fictitious person who represents your “typical” customer. In order to create the most precise and tangible picture possible, the buyer persona is usually given a name and is described in a short profile that summarises their most important sociodemographic data, their interests, needs and buying behaviour. The following points can serve as a guide:
- Demographie: Geschlecht, Alter, Wohnort, Familienstand
- Beruflicher Hintergrund der Zielgruppe: Karriere, Job
- Vor welchen Problemen und Einwänden steht unsere Person?
- Wie können wir helfen, Ziele zu erreichen und Probleme zu überwinden?
Having a concrete buyer persona makes it much more straight-forward to answer the question: “What would my ideal customer do?”With a defined image of the target customer in mind, it becomes easier to take the right approach; marketing is not simply played out to anyone and everyone, but rather is aimed at a specific person.
3. Target group analysis
Now that the target group has been defined, it needs to be analysed as regards life situation and related needs, as well as consumer behaviour. At this point, it is useful to work with the classic “w” questions. Why does the target group make a purchase? When, where and under what circumstances (e.g. price sensitivity, brand preferences). Who makes the purchase decision, and what influences it? The aim is to develop a deeper understanding of your own target group and their needs, lifestyles and buying motivations so as to adjust your next campaign accordingly. Target group analysis is an iterative process and should be repeated at regular intervals.
4. Marketing that fits your target group
Finally, the question arises as to how best to market the product to the target group: online or offline? Or perhaps both? Text, image or video? Having worked on the previous analyses and definitions, the answers should come easily. In the digital world, the targeting options are usually easier to measure, as every click, every like, the length of stay and many more metrics are recorded. A/B testing is also easier to set up digitally, and smaller media budgets are often big enough to implement the relevant measures. Even so, the target group and its needs must of course always be in the foreground, and marketing must be adapted accordingly in order to achieve a campaign with as little wastage as possible.
