How To Craft a Winning Target Market Strategy: 6 Easy Steps + Examples

You’ve conducted thorough research, identified your ideal audience, and honed in on your messaging. Now, it’s time to put your hard work to the test. Introducing a new product or brand to the market is exhilarating but poses significant challenges in today’s competitive landscape.

Simply entering a market and hoping you’ll resonate with consumers won’t cut it. This is where a target market strategy comes in.

A target market is a specific group defined by common characteristics such as demographics, income, lifestyles, or behaviors.

As such, target market strategies are essential for delivering precise messaging to your target audience through the right channels at the right time. While creating a target market strategy requires investment in time and resources, the potential ROI makes it more than worthwhile.

Read on for expert tips and insights into creating effective target market strategies.

What is a target market strategy?

A target market strategy is the detailed plan your business makes to reach a specific group of consumers in a predefined audience, also known as your target market.

A target market strategy aims to:

• Introduce your company and/or product to an intended audience
• Boost sales and build brand awareness

It should include messaging, KPIs, lead generation, pipeline prediction, budget, and more.

To determine which smaller segments of the larger market present the most promising opportunities, you would need to conduct a target market analysis. A target market analysis identifies the consumers most likely to buy your product or use your service based on their demographics or preferences. With that information, you can create messaging to capture this audience and even capitalize on micro-consumer demand. It’s an essential building block of traditional audience analysis and the first step towards a future-proof target market strategy, as it will help you understand their pain points and online preferences.

After conducting a target market analysis, you may find that multiple audience segments are relevant to your business, but how you approach each will likely differ based on their characteristics, wants, and needs. That means you may employ multiple target market strategies simultaneously with different focuses.

The importance of target market strategies

The most critical aspect of target market strategies is increasing the chances of success when connecting with your audience or expanding into a potential new market.

Because of this, it’s one of the most important processes you can establish for your business, laying the groundwork for growth and development. Successful target market strategies mean connecting with and converting new customers and fostering long-standing relationships with existing ones.

There are a myriad of other benefits of target market strategies:

Budget resources effectively – When you know exactly what target market you are going after, you can be more efficient with your company’s money and your team’s time and effort. For example, if you run paid ads on social media, you can eliminate wasteful spending on geos or age groups that fall outside your target market.

Secure a competitive edge – With consumers doing due diligence online, they look at your competitors’ websites before deciding who to purchase from. If you find and target these prospects with the right messaging before your rivals, you can increase your chances of converting them.

Maximize your marketing channels – A robust target market strategy outlines the key traffic channels to reach your audience. If your website traffic mainly comes from organic search, affiliates, or display ads, concentrate your efforts there. Prioritize your SEO strategy with relevant keywords. For paid search, craft ads that align with your audience’s needs and desires.

Get more bang for your buck – One size doesn’t always fit all. While it may seem easier to go wide with your marketing efforts, casting a large net won’t automatically yield higher results. Consumers today expect personalization, and they’ll be able to tell the difference between a general marketing campaign and one speaking directly to who they are and what they believe in.

6 target market strategy examples

The type of target market strategy you employ will depend on what you’re trying to achieve and how you segment your market.

Here are some of the most common examples of different target market strategies and when you’d use them:

1. Demographic – This type of market segmentation uses the target demographics of your audience;– their observable and measurable characteristics, which include age, gender, annual income, occupation, religion, family size, and more. Suppose you find through your target market analysis that the demographics of your main audience are females from the US between the ages of 24 and 34. You’d ensure any digital strategy resonates with this demographic.

Learn more about defining your audience demographics

2. Geographic: Similar to demographic segmentation, geographic segmentation centers on observable characteristics like location or region. Define a specific area, such as Europe or the US, community type (urban, suburban, or rural), or climate. Once you establish the boundaries of your target region, consider language and cultural beliefs relevant to that area.

3. Psychographic: If you’re trying to answer “Why is my audience buying my product?” psychographic segmentation is the route you should take for your target market strategy. It’s all about understanding their motivation to buy, including lifestyle, values, hobbies, or even political orientation.

4. Behavioral: As opposed to psychographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation is based on consumers’ actual actions, including buying patterns and preferences. To win here, you must tailor your products, services, or marketing messaging according to purchase habits, browsing behaviors, interactions with your brand, overlap with competitors, buying history, and brand loyalty. An example would be creating customer segments based on their purchase frequency: monthly, quarterly, or annually.

5. Niche marketing: A strategy focusing on a small subgroup of your business will employ niche marketing tactics. This unique group has specific wants, expectations, and pain points. As the go-to company for that niche, targeting these smaller viable markets can greatly impact your audience loyalty, engagement rate, and business growth. Look at some ways to differentiate a niche market from a border audience segment:

6. B2B targeting: B2B market research centers around a business’s needs, preferences, and behaviors by treating the business entity as an individual consumer. In contrast to B2C research that examines interactions between a business and individuals, a B2B target market strategy explores how businesses collaborate and what they can offer each other.

Some other examples of target market strategies you could come across and incorporate into your marketing planning are:

• Technographic (What type of tech does your audience use, or what products do they buy?)
• Lifestyle  (Are there any habits of your target market that stand out? What about interests, hobbies, values, or beliefs?)
• Seasonal (When are their peak periods of interest?)
• Transactional (How do they make their purchases?)

Leveraging Similarweb to create a target market strategy

Creating a target market strategy involves multiple steps of researching, engaging, and converting your audience. Here’s an easy-to-follow guide on how to easily craft one using Similarweb’s market research tools:

Step 1: Conduct market research

Market research should always be your first step when creating a target market strategy because it gives you an overview of where you stand in your industry.

Similarweb digital intelligence can help you do all this with one single source of truth. Our market research tools help you keep track of market changes, benchmark your performance, and generate audience insights to make immediate, data-driven decisions.

Below is an example of how Similarweb gives you an accurate overview of market size for any industry, including unique visitors, popularity score, and key user engagement metrics.

Step 2: Define your target audience

You may have gotten an initial idea of your audience during the market research phase of creating your strategy. Now, it’s time to define their demographic or behavioral traits. Who is your ideal customer? Consider factors like age, gender, location, values, and more.

Once you know who your customer is, dig deeper into audience insights. If we stick with the Fashion & Apparel industry in the US, we can see that in the last six months, top non-branded keywords include wedding guest dresses, graphic tees, and cargo pants – these are the trends in the industry that you’d want to focus on to keep up with changing consumer demand.

Trends in the US Fashion & Apparel Industry via the Similarweb platform.Once you know who your target audience is, choose how you want to reach them. Different strategies include mass, differentiated, niche, or micro marketing, depending on how broad of a market you’re going after and how specific your messaging needs to be.

Step 3: Analyze your competitors

Competitive analysis must be part of your target market strategy.

With the Market Quadrant Analysis report, you can assess top players and major competitors in your industry based on different KPIs. The example below shows that Nike and Gap are among the leading retailers in the US Fashion & Apparel market, with solid audience growth over time. Macy’s has the largest audience based on unique visitors, but its growth is stagnating.

You can also analyze competitors based on brand strength (which players are highly sought after and well known?), cost efficiency (which players acquire traffic economically?), and loyalty and retention (which players have a strong customer base?).

Step 4: Segment your market

Next, you’ll want to break down your market into smaller segments and focus on the ones that matter the most to your business. Let’s continue with the Fashion and Apparel industry. Through market segmentation, you may find that the women’s formalwear in your market is oversaturated, while there is room to win some market share in women’s athleisure.

With Similarweb’s Segment Analysis tool, you can:

• Analyze the performance of a specific topic, category, brand, or line of business on any website
• Benchmark performance within a customized industry to spot opportunities and efficiencies
• Get granular and actionable insights to quantify the impact of specific campaigns or offers over time

See the tool in action:

Step 5: Finalize your marketing mix

When crafting your ideal marketing channels mix, focus on the 4 P’s:

• Product – Make sure that the product or service you offer meets the needs of your target market
• Price – Set a price that aligns with your customers’ expectations and budgets; research your competitors to make sure that your pricing isn’t too high or below industry standards
• Promotion – Craft messaging that highlights your key value propositions
• Place – Run your target market strategy across your audience’s distribution channels

With Similarweb Marketing Channels Overview, you can see if most of your traffic comes from direct, organic search, social media, email, paid search, and display ads and compare that to the industry average.

Step 6: Analyze and assess what’s effective

After creating and implementing a target market strategy, you’ll want to conduct a post-mortem analysis and evaluate what worked and where you can improve next time, using different metrics and KPIs to track your performance. A good starting point is to analyze your website traffic and see if there are any significant fluctuations in the weeks or months after launching your target market strategy.

You can also look at the differences between new vs. returning users to your website to see if you successfully acquire traffic or retain current customers. Net new visitors compared to the number of returning users will help you gauge the “stickiness” of your website. If your website is sticky, your customers will likely return rather than look for alternatives.

5 expert tips for creating target market strategies

While a lot goes into creating a target market strategy, the rewards will be worth it. Keep these 5 tips in mind along the way:

1. Clearly define your goals: Make sure your objectives are realistic and in line with your business’s broader goals and values.
2. Spend time crafting your value proposition: Communicate what makes you different from your competitors and why your unique offering can’t be found elsewhere. It’s what makes you stand out from the crowd – make sure it’s clear and understood!
3. Use consistent branding and tone of voice: While you may tweak your target market strategy based on different audiences, at the end of the day, all communication from your company should be on brand and use the same tone of voice. Be consistent with your messaging.
4. Be open to feedback: Ask your customers for feedback so that you can adapt your strategy and improve where needed. This is also a great way to engage with them and build better relationships.
5. Invest in a website analytics tool: Make sure you have the data and insights to refine your target market strategy based on your performance and changing market dynamics.

Ready, set, target your market!

Target market strategies unlock the door to meeting your target audience and delivering the right message through appropriate channels.

To do so effectively, you need data-driven insight into your audience’s behavior and preferences, competitors’ performance, and market health.

Similarweb is here to help you every step of the way. Get started for free and win your market today.

FAQs

1. What is a target market strategy?

A target market strategy is the detailed plan your business makes to reach a specific group of consumers in a predefined market, also known as your target market. A target market strategy aims to introduce your company and/or product to an intended audience, boost sales, and build brand awareness.

2. Why are target market strategies important? 

Target market strategies help increase the chances of success when connecting with your audience or expanding to a potential new market. They can also help you budget resources effectively, secure a competitive advantage, get the most out of your marketing channels, and increase ROI even with a smaller audience.

3. How can you create a target market strategy?

There are five important steps to creating a target market strategy:

1. Conduct market research
2. Define your audience
3. Analyze your competitors
4. Segment your market
5. Finalize your marketing mix
6. Assess the results.