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Target Market Segment Strategy

Once you have done your market segmentation for the business you are interested in then you need to develop a strategy to target these segments - that is "Target Market Segment Strategy" in a nutshell.

As a marketer you must try to understand your target market in order to sell better to them.

For arguments sake let's say you are selling training shoes.

There are likely 4 types of people that would wear training shoes:

  • Professional Athletes
  • The Keep fit brigade
  • Fashionistas
  • Day to day wearers

Now you could target your marketing strategy to all four sectors - but that's going to be expensive as well as confusing to your customer who might see an advert for the shoe in two different guises which ultimately might put them off.

If we look at each segment in turn:

Professional athletes is going to be a small sector, they might also expect to be given their kit for free as a sponsorship deal, if you can sell to them then you need a perceived high quality product with a large mark-up as you aren't going to sell many...although they could be doing ultra marathons and going through lots of pairs.

The Keep fit brigade will be a reasonable sector size, has steady growth, but probably won't want to pay the margins of top athletes.

Fashionistas will be a bigger sector than athletes, has steady growth and the margins will be high as they don't mind paying for the quality.

Day to day wearers will be the biggest sector and have the lowest profit margins.

Some of these sectors can overlap - Fashionistas do go to the gym for instance.

As a marketer you need to think what is likely to be the best sector to aim your product at in order to maximize your profits, as well as looking at it from a long term perspective...is your market still going to be around in x years time. You will need to consider competitors in the market already, distribution channels for your product - how easy would it be to get into the distributors pockets? Is the strategy for selling this product to divergent from your current products you sell? Does your company have the ability to create a professional shoe - if you are known as a cheap and cheerful brand then probably not.

After taking all the factors into consideration you need to plump for one or the other!

Once you've done that you need to come up with a marketing strategy aimed at that sector.

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