Can a product have multiple target markets?

It’s not uncommon for businesses to have more than one target audience or ideal customer, especially since Covid-19 witnessed many companies having to pivot and adapt their products and services to cater to a new normal.

However, not spending time creating a strategy for multiple target audiences often results in a weak brand message that attempts to appeal to everyone and ends up attracting no one.

Today, we’re talking about how you can develop a strategy to target multiple target audiences.

Get clear on each target audience. 

Dig deep into understanding each of your ideal clients. Just because you have multiple target audiences, doesn’t mean you can be vague on their wants and needs. 

Spend some time creating customer personas for each target audience. This will help you to grasp their real pain points and challenges, as well as set out clear goals for your marketing and sales strategies. 

Here’s a blog we wrote on how to understand your customer. 

From here, write down how your product/service addresses each target audiences challenges. Perhaps you have different products or services for each target audience, or alternatively, their USPs change depends on who you’re selling to.

Link up common themes and goals.

When you have an overview of each of your target audiences, go back through your notes and pull out any common themes, whether that’s a challenge, frustration or goal. 

Let’s take the example of a product that helps solo service providers, but also is widely used by teams in a corporate setting. 

The two target audiences will have different challenges and frustrations, but the overarching goal of your company could be to help them save time and do their jobs more efficiently. 

By establishing these overarching themes, you maintain brand consistency while still appealing to two or more separate target audiences. 

Split up your website into dedicated sections.

Create different user journeys for each of your target audiences on your website. This could be as simple as dedicating a section of your website to each ideal customer. 

Here are some examples of this in action: 

Splitting up your website in this way enables you to talk to each target audience in their own language and appeal to their unique pain points without worrying about alienating other potential customers. 

We have a blog post dedicated to designing a website for multiple target audiences here.

Consider your social strategy. 

Some businesses may have different social media accounts to appeal to their various target audiences. And, while this works in certain circumstances, it is possible to appeal to various audiences without multiple accounts on each platform.

Instead, take a look at where your different target audiences hang out online. Perhaps LinkedIn works for one and Instagram is more appealing to the other. 

Let’s take the example of a company that provides furniture for the corporate sector, but also wishes to appeal to the general public for home and office furniture.

Your social strategy could target the corporate sector via LinkedIn and the general public via Instagram and Facebook. Meanwhile, Twitter could be used for customer service for both sectors.

Key takeaways.

• Know your different target audiences inside out.
• Be clear on your overarching brand mission, vision and goals.
• Craft different user journeys and experiences around each audience.

If you have any questions about how to design for a diverse client base, get in touch with a member of our team right now.

Want to truly engage your target audience and craft marketing messages that connect with your ideal customers? You don’t want to design a single campaign with a broad message that targets a mass audience. After all, customers are all unique with individual characteristics and behaviors. 

Instead, rely on a multi-segment marketing approach and utilize strategies that target individuals based on factors like location, demographics and buying behaviors.

What is multi-segment marketing?

What is multi-segment marketing? Understanding the concept starts with identifying what a marketing segment actually is. Market segmentation occurs when prospective customers are divided into different groups based on factors like demographics, buying behavior and other various characteristics. 

By dividing groups of customers into subgroups with shared needs and preferences, marketers can create targeted messages to reach each audience. Therefore, multi-segment marketing is the process of dividing a target market into various segments in order to more closely target each segment with a different message or product. Companies employ multi-segment marketing strategies to sell the same product to different population segments, customizing their messages to fit the needs and wants of each audience. 

The practice is more effective than mass marketing with broad messages that often fail to resonate with most of the larger audience. Brands marketing multiple products also might utilize multi-segment marketing efforts to divide their marketing strategies and appeal to target audiences for each product line.

Crafting a multi-segment marketing strategy

Are you ready to take your marketing strategies to the next level? A differentiated marketing strategy can help improve the value of a business while building a solid reputation among its target audience. 

Ready to build a multi-segment marketing strategy for your brand? Be sure you don’t skip the following important steps:

1. Choose target demographics

Before you can segment your broader audience, it’s important to determine your target customers. Can you identify your best potential prospects by demographics, geographic location or interests? You can use tools like Google Analytics to analyze various demographics and gain insight as you decide how to best cater your message to your key audience members.

2. Develop differentiated plans for each group

Once you’ve identified your target audience groups, you can exploit their differences to develop targeted marketing plans for each. If a group is specific to a certain geographic region, for example, you can craft a marketing message that speaks to consumers in that area. If the market segment shares a common interest, that also can be used to create a targeted marketing message.

3. Position your outputs

Like any other marketing strategy, it’s important to properly position your outputs when devising a multi-segmented marketing plan. Positioning outputs helps spark interest among customers while promoting a brand and its benefits. Are all your marketing materials consistent in their messaging and branding? Positioning strategies should consider audience and product details, competitor data and unique qualities that set a brand apart in the market. Gathering this information helps design better strategies to target segmented audiences.

4. Segment your audience

When it comes time to actually segment your audience of prospective customers, you can group them in a variety of ways, including:

• Geographic segmentation is based on cities, counties, states and zip codes used to define a target audience. Combining geographic information with other demographic data lets marketing teams form specific profiles for their target customers.
• Demographic segmentation focuses on customer characteristics such as age, gender and income level. Tools like Google Analytics make it simple to identify individual customer details so targeted campaigns can be designed for them.
• Through behavioral segmentation, marketers divide audiences based on their personalities, values and lifestyles. Psychographic information from interviews, surveys and other customer data can be used to segment people into behavioral groups. Behavioral segmentation also helps to identify how customers will react to different products based on their attitudes.

5. Evaluate usage ratings

By evaluating usage ratings, marketers can boost their multi-segmented strategies. For example, targeting marketing campaigns toward those who frequent specific sites can increase sales. Marketers even might create a strategy for frequent visitors and a separate strategy for light users.

Presentation tools to support multi-segment marketing campaigns

Market segmentation can be highly effective when developing targeted marketing strategies, but the practice also can result in complex, multi-faceted campaigns. How do you organize a complicated multi-segmented campaign and keep everyone on the same page?

Presentations can play an integral part in designing a successful multi-segment marketing campaign. Teams can share engaging and informative slide decks during huddles or meetings to bring everyone up to speed efficiently.

Presentations like Beautiful.ai’s marketing campaign plan template were curated by professional designers who chose the perfect slides to illustrate important campaign points. Likewise, the customer profile presentation template features all the right slides to showcase a company’s ideal target audience. Just add your custom content to personalize the presentation template and use it to define and identify target market segments and track target audiences.