Defining Your Target Market

Within your business, it is important to know the makeup of your customers. The makeup may spell out the age, gender, frequency of purchases, and so on. We recommend creating a spreadsheet listing all of your customers, and then grouping them into different segments that describe their traits. If you utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) program, this process is much simpler. See Appendix B for some that we recommend.

Definition

Customer relationship management (CRM) is software that enables you to keep track of your customers and prospects to help attract, engage, and maintain relationships.

Everyone who reads this book likely comes from different avenues of life and participates in many different businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re a consultant, a marketing manager, or a handyman—you must define who you’re marketing to.

Your target market doesn’t need to be laser sharp when you’re first defining it. For instance, you might start out with a target market of athletic men. Later on, as you get a better sense of your market, you might refine it even more: athletic men in their 30s who live in large metropolitan areas and who love adventure sports.

Knowing your target market helps you define your message so that you can give your audience exactly what they want and need. (We explore more of the application and tools to use for defining your target market in Chapter 5 when we talk about defining the voice of your business and in Chapter 15 when we get into Facebook advertising.)

If you serve a lot of people with a wide variety of characteristics, you might want to consider breaking down your target market into segments, which we discuss in the following section.

Dividing Your Market into Segments

After defining your target market, it’s time to break it down into smaller chunks. For example, if your target market is health-care finance professionals—the people in the financial sector of a hospital—you may have products and services for different levels of the organization, from the entry-level billing desk to the CFO of the organization. You might want to divide your target market into the following segments:

Breaking your target market into these smaller categories enables you to fine-tune your messages for the various audiences.

If your target market is senior management, you might approach them with a message that speaks to the strategic attributes of your products and services, possibly providing them with case studies, and short- to long-term results. You might say something like this:

If your target market is mid-level professionals, you might approach them with tactical attributes such as the five steps to improving your daily schedule to increase revenues. Here’s a possible marketing pitch:

If your target market is entry-level employees, you might approach them with attributes that show them how to perform specific job tasks to increase their knowledge and build their skills, such as this:

You can use segmentation to divide your market into a variety of categories, including the following:

DEFINITION

Segmentation is the process of dividing people into geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, psychographic, behavioral, and product categories. Segmentation makes it much easier to target your ideal audience.

Geographic segmentation: The intended audience is divided according to geographic units, such as nations, states, regions, counties, cities, or neighborhoods.

Let’s say you run a zoo in Brookfield, Illinois. For the most part, you cater to the surrounding areas, but you also pick up some tourists visiting Chicago. Because the zoo caters to people coming to a specific physical location, you should tailor your marketing to people in that geographic area. Facebook makes it possible to focus your posts to only a given country, state, and city (see Figure 2.1). The following steps explain how.

You also have the option to enter a specific language if that is a desired segment you wish to limit your segmented post to.

Demographic segmentation: The intended audience is divided into categories based on demographic variables (age, income, sex, occupation, education, family size, and the like).

Let’s say you work for a national nonprofit organization that wants to get 1,500 college-age kids to volunteer at a benefit concert. You can use Facebook ads to reach a targeted segment of your audience. The Facebook ad platform enables you to segment the exact audience that you want your ads displayed to. So in this example, we are able to pick out men and women between the ages of 17 and 22.

We’ll cover Facebook ads in more detail in Chapter 15.

Socioeconomic and psychographic segmentation: In socioeconomic segmentation, the intended audience is divided into a person’s work experience and their family’s position relative to others, based on income, education, and occupation. With psychographic segmentation, the intended audience is divided according to social class, lifestyle, or personality characteristics.

You can market to each of these segments via Facebook ads based on the details in people’s Profiles. You can focus sociological segmentation on a particular group of colleges and workplaces. You can address psychographic segmentation by keywords based on lifestyles.

Behavioral and product-related segmentation: With behavioral segmentation, the intended audience is divided on the basis of their knowledge of, attitude toward, use of, or response to the product. With product-related segmentation, the intended audience for a given product is divided by the amount of product usage, usually categorized demographically or psychographically.

These last types of segmentation present themselves in the course of conversations on Facebook. They are your most active fans—people who are passionate about your brands and are vocal about it. They are almost always heavy users or were once heavy users of your products and services. You won’t need to reach out to these people; they will reach out to you.

Harnessing the Power of Social Media

The more Facebook fans you have, the more people you have available to help spread your company’s message—and the faster you will grow. This is the key to marketing in social media.

FRIENDLY ADVICE

Hundreds of millions of people log in to Facebook every single day. And the average user has 130 friends. That means that, on average, every Facebook fan puts you in touch with 130 other people. Now that’s social marketing!

When you acquire fans on Facebook, you not only have to think about them as individuals but also consider who they know or are connected to.

Imagine if you have 500 fans. If each fan has 130 friends, you have an estimated reach of 65,000 people with the power to further spread your message with a click of a button. It would take most small businesses years to reach that many people using traditional marketing. Facebook has made it possible to reach a huge number of people in a very short time, possibly days. Can you imagine reaching over 65,000 people in a given campaign in one day? What would that do for your business in terms of buzz, exposure, and potential sales?

Now, you probably won’t reach 100 percent of these people in your marketing efforts. But there’s a good chance a large percentage of these people will at least glimpse your brand as they interact with their friends on Facebook. At the onset of marketing, it’s all about exposure to your brand. As people see your brand, they’ll start to form an idea that your company is one that has already influenced one of their friends and already have a positive attitude toward it.

Have you ever heard of the term “six degrees of separation”? It’s the idea that, on average, everyone is only six steps away from a relationship with anyone else on the planet. Facebook makes it easy for people to see each other’s connections; it’s up to you to take advantage of them.

Last year, John’s agency eRocketFuel ran a series of Facebook ads targeting dry cleaners after John spoke at a national conference for cleaners. His ads and posts on the DryCleaning and Laundry Institute (DLI) Facebook page were seen by many cleaners. This led to many friend requests and fans on the eRocketFuel Fan page.

That, in turn, led to articles published in Crain’s, a national business magazine, and more than 15 speaking engagements with dry cleaners from New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina, all the way to Australia. It also led to consulting contracts with several dry cleaners all around the world—all by harnessing a little segmentation on Facebook.

Marketing to Individual Segments

Demographic, psychographic, and geographic attributes help you to connect to people in a way that speaks directly to them. A person’s demographic and psychographic makeup may contribute to the way she interacts on Facebook and her many preferences.

For example, Generation Y college students tend to have the following key attributes that you might want to consider before marketing to them:

These characteristics help explain why social media is so popular with this demographic. With social media, the students are in control of whom they interact with, and they can voice their opinions. Now, as a business trying to reach such a young segment, you have to do more than just be present on Facebook. You need to talk to them appropriately, which we discuss in Chapter 5.

FEEDBACK

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that teens are the only demographic on Facebook. The fastest-growing segment using Facebook and other social media are people age 55 and older. Watch out, little whippersnappers.

What about geography? It makes sense that people relate well to things that happen in their neighborhoods, hometowns, and even states. That’s when they stop and really take notice.

If a catastrophe takes place 5 miles from you, wouldn’t you stop and listen longer than if the same thing happened halfway around the globe? The same goes for marketing on Facebook: keeping your focus on the geographic segments that matter most to you will generate the biggest impact.

Is your business participating in a local charity run? How about a coat drive for children? Are you going to be at a festival this weekend? Let your fans know about it. These are the things that make people smile and interact with your business.