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Target marketing is effective for all businesses but especially useful for small businesses needing to stand out and compete with smaller ad budgets. The more you know about your buyers, the more you’ll understand what they want and how to target them.

The problem is, no matter what you’re selling, online advertising can be expensive and has stiff competition. It does depend on your small business niche, but usually you have a clear buyer you are trying to reach. With Web marketing, you can target those buyers to be more effective.

Why Target Marketing?
Target marketing focuses on the specific audience you want to sell to. In short, the majority of people do not need your product. You need to target those who do. Some people have pets, and buy pet supplies. If you sell pet supplies, consumers who have no pets will never buy from you. Target marketing can save you time and money by directing your advertising toward smaller groups. Instead of reaching the whole world, you only want to target a smaller piece of the pie and can spend much less to get it.

Keyword Targeting
Keyword targeting concerns search engine marketing and contextual marketing. In both cases, you can narrow down your specific buyer with ease. If you rank highly for “pet supplies” on Google and Yahoo, you’re using search marketing. That would also be considered a short-tail keyword, a more basic search term.

Short tail keywords are very common and get good search volume, but the problem is the sheer number of sites competing for those keywords. If you are trying to rank well for “pet supplies,” you could get millions of hits, but you’d also have a large amount of competition, making it that much harder to rank well and even harder stand out. Using targeted keywords can help. 

A long-tail keyword is simply a more targeted search phrase, such as “Iams mature dog food”. That’s much more specific to the actual product the searcher is looking for and gives you have an immediate idea on what the buyer wants.

Searchers often get tired of sifting though page after page of results, and once they are done researching and are ready to make a purchase, will typically narrow their search by typing in keywords that are more specific. By focusing on targeted long-tail keywords, you can reach buyers with specific needs who are ready to make a purchase. In addition, you can also suggest additional products for them once they reach your site, since you already know a lot about them based just on their search terms.

Demographic Targeting
This is another useful way to narrow down your niche group of buyers, if not as effective as keyword targeting. For your small business, you can have a select group you know buys the most from you. A fashion store in Los Angeles might target women of a certain age, with a certain income, and using the English language. You can create demographic targeting in a variety of ways beyond that, such as interests and marital status. This directly markets to a target group most likely to buy your product or service.

Behavioral Targeting
The last target marketing method we’ll go over is the use of cookies to track users actions. This is rarely used by small businesses, but cookies enable companies to see what users are searching, reading, and buying online. “Cookies” work by recording your search history to better market to you. In other words, you may start seeing marketing more directly related to you, such as with online booksellers like Amazon.com, because what you’re doing is being tracked in order to better serve you. In some cases, prospects are against someone placing tracking info on their computer; most are harmless, but you must respect buyers’ privacy. Still, the better you know your prospect, the better chance you have of closing a sale.

Clearly, target marketing is very relevant online. If you can find out as much information as possible on prospects, you can stand apart as a business no matter your size. Once you target your best niche, you can turn more clicks into sales.