Taking aim at your target market

Do you know how to reach your target market? You might say by advertising, e-mail broadcasting or calling someone on the telephone. That, however, is not marketing.

Many people associate marketing with such tactics because they are fun. Advertising is fun, promotions are fun and sending out e-mail campaigns is fun, too. Yet those tactics actually fall at the end of the marketing cycle. Although they are an important part of marketing, those efforts are useless if you lack the knowledge of who you are and who your target market is. In fact, marketing is analysis, and a sound marketing strategy is based on that analysis.

The beginning point of effective marketing is to know who your target market is. That does not mean if you sell homeowners’ insurance, anyone who owns a home falls in your target audience. You must be more specific in identifying who you are selling to so that your marketing is more effective.

Marketing is the analysis of potential customers, competitors and your agency, combined with an analysis of what segments exist that your business can most meet the needs of. The marketing analysis also includes determining the most profitable segments to target your efforts toward, positioning your products and then doing what’s necessary to deliver on that positioning.

That may sound like a lot of work, but the truth is with a little research, you can easily find the answer to those questions and focus only on your target market. That way, you avoid blanketing an entire market universe hoping for something to work.

Before starting with marketing tactics — ads, direct mailers, flyers, etc. — clarify a crucial notion regarding your individual strategy. The marketing strategy helps you to achieve your goals, and it should include two mandatory elements:

• Which target consumers have a viable potential of buying whatever you intend to sell?

• What offer you will be presenting to those consumers that appeals to them so that they realize the said potential, given their alternatives?

Looking at the first element, target consumers are consumers that make up a sizeable enough group with buying power and a desire to buy what you are offering.

Why would they want what you are selling?

You should identify the answer to that question.

There may be several reasons. For example, the target consumers may not be consumers of your kind of product yet, but they might be consumers if something happens or if they are exposed to a certain message. It could be that they have special needs or preferences, which up until now, were not taken care of by your competitors. Remember that needs can be psychological, social and aesthetic, as well as physical.

The next part of target marketing is making those target consumers an offer that they cannot refuse. That is key to your strategy. Offer something to those consumers that might improve their situation, solve a problem, give them more than what they already get for the same price or opens new opportunities. Essentially, you should be motivating your potential customer to buy from you — not from your competition

Here are four easy steps to develop your target market:

1) Identify the people you believe have potential to buy what you intend to sell.

2) Determine precisely what they should be doing (that they are not doing already and will probably not do if you do not tell them what to do) that would direct them to choose your agency over the competition.

3) Identify the real reasons that should motivate them to change their behavior.

4) Clarify the exact benefits they can expect when they buy from you.

If you follow those four steps, you will be well on your way to developing a well-defined target audience. And that means you will stop spending marketing dollars on a market that has no interest in what you have to sell.

Marilyn Chelini and Birgit Ricket are co-founders of Insurance Results Marketing Group, which provides marketing solutions for the insurance industry. For more information on the company’s IMAP automated sales development tool, visit www.imap1.com. Or, call 866-778-1389 for more information.