AI

The first step towards building a successful business is having clarity about your consumer personas and the means to reach out to them in the best possible way. For years & years, the advertising strategies of all successful businesses, even before starting any marketing efforts, have tried to figure out the target market their product or service is suitable for. Instead of traditional marketing where marketers would try to make something as generic as an ad and would use it for all the audiences, trying to work on the principle of ATL advertising in its greatest interruption marketing aspect. 

Ever since marketing has gotten more nuanced and customer-centric, things have changed for the better and targeting the right audience with the right product and services at the right time, place and day has become an integral part of conversion-driven marketing campaigns. eCommerce marketing in particular has become a sophisticated space because of the unique challenges faced by industry, lack of availability of historical body of knowledge and talent. Leading full-stack enablers have been quite successful in filling that void by driving conversions through high performing automated ads, AI-driven digital campaigns, segmented email targeting and other key strategies.

Cogs & Pegs of Target Marketing 

Let’s take a dive and see how Target Marketing works. Target marketing is dividing your audience into different segments; identifying the size of demands and growth potential; developing an appropriate media mix and adapting to the changing target’s need by optimising ads. You can also involve emerging technologies like AdTech & MarTech to boost ROAS in an efficient and effective manner. Here’s is the step-by-step guide for your approach towards target marketing:

Stage 1 – Division of the market into multiple market segments through geographic, demographic, behavioural or psychographic segmentation.

Stage 2 – Recognising target segments on aspects like profit, demand size, the potential for growth etc.

Stage 3 – Developing the appropriate media & marketing mix and strategy for the target audience to maximise customer delight and move them further into the funnel.

Stage 4 – It’s really important to test and optimise ads as often as possible. This will give you a grasp of your audience, help you find the perfect blend of creativity, content and call to action in your ad and maximise your target audience base.

Target marketing is mostly an ever-evolving process since it takes time and energy to find the perfect audience mix for your product. Once you identify that perfect mix of audience, you can work on converting them into customers, then repeat customers and then eventually brand loyalists. In the first step of target marketing, marketers find out the demographic, geographic, or psychographic variables to explain buying needs, tastes, and behaviour variations. Then, they divide consumers into market segments based on these variables.

Here is a brief description of target audience segmentation for your digital marketing strategy:

Demographic Segmentation

• Gender
• Age
• Life cycle
• Education
• Income
• Profession
• Religion

Geographic Segmentation

• City
• Urban
• Suburbs
• Country
• Climate

Psychographic Segmentation

• Personality
• Lifestyle
• Attitude
• Interests
• Values 

Behavioural Segmentation

• Benefits-oriented
• User status
• Usage rate
• Purchase occasion
• Readiness status
• Attitude-driven 
• Loyalty status

Segments in target marketing consist of homogeneous consumers. Since they are divided in a certain way, they are bound to exhibit similar needs, tastes, and buying patterns, thus, they also respond to the marketing efforts in the same way. This gives some predictability to your growth marketing strategy and ensures a stable return to your eCommerce marketing efforts.

According to your marketing goals, when you segment your audience, you need to consider a couple of things in your mind. These factors will decide how your campaign goes and how the results will be. Here is the criterion in selecting target segments:

• Segment Size 
• Growth Prospect
• Potential Profit
• Structural Attractiveness 

Once the marketers are done selecting the criterion, they then work to develop a growth marketing strategy and a media & marketing mix accordingly. Since the target market audience is homogeneous, the tough work of trying to make a ‘fit-for-all’ strategy is replaced by an easy, personalised and more effective marketing strategy.

Get up to speed on: Segmenting & Attributing

One of the first things a marketer does while deliberating upon the growth marketing strategy is to try to segment the audience in different parts. These parts are further categorised into sub-parts and each is important to cover before you start working on your eCommerce marketing strategy. Check these out here:

Demographic Segmentation – Your basic information such as age, gender, education level, marital status, race, religion, income level and more. This data is easy to obtain and categorise because there are only a handful of options for each category.

Psychographic Segmentation – Psychographics help you determine and explore the psyche or the interests of your audience, thus, operating as the building block of your growth marketing strategy. These include values, beliefs, interests, lifestyles, personalities and other intangible things.

Behaviour Segmentation – Based on how the target customers act and behave, this segmentation includes their purchasing habits, spending patterns, user-level and all manners of brand interactions.

Geographic segmentation – Your target audience’s location can help you better your eCommerce marketing strategy. Be it neighbourhoods, area codes, cities, regions, countries, etc., this data is crucial in formulating hyperlocal or local campaigns for your eCommerce agency.

Target Marketing & how it can be an efficient tool

Better ROI in terms of resources used – Since the growth marketing strategy is tailor-made for a certain set of consumers, you’re bound to have a higher engagement since the content that you are using is also tailored to answer their needs and wishes. This means the content will be able to delight the consumer more and also help in pushing them further into the funnel. Employing AI & ML powered AdTech & MarTech technologies, you can boost your ROAS more.

Better conversions – A large chunk of target marketing is oriented towards delighting the consumers and pushing them further in the funnel, you’re bound to notice a good bump in conversions. The content will have high acceptance and will be attractive to the Target audience, thus boosting sales. 

Trackable and predictable results – By the virtue of mapping the segments of a homogeneous audience, you can use the tools provided by your campaign manager to get a clearer approximation of your marketing efforts.

These are some of the essential points of data your eCommerce Digital Marketing team or a service provider would need to formulate for deriving a perfect eCommerce marketing strategy for your brand to scale profitably.

Looking for eCommerce Digital Marketing solutions or an eCommerce Agency? Choose the Full-Stack D2C Enabler – GreenHonchos and scale your business online! For more tips & tricks on eCommerce marketing and D2C growth strategies, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit our website to know more about our services.