Creating a Marketing Plan – Step 2 – Defining Target Audiences

Last week we began creating our marketing plan.  First, we created a SWOT Analysis to determine our company’s current competitive position.  Then we began to outline our marketing objective using specific details instead of general statements.

The next step in a marketing plan is to choose the appropriate target audience (also known as target market or target public).  A target audience is a group of people who share common traits or interests that you / your company will be marketing your product or service to.  This group of people may be of the same gender, age, geographic area, income levels, or stage in the family-life cycle.  The possibilities for what makes up a target audience are endless, as long as there are commonalities among the group.

Every marketing campaign will have a primary target audience.  This will be the main group of people that we are trying to motivate to buy our product or service.  For example:  GoPro’s Super Bowl commercial, Dubstep Baby, appealed to their target market of males who are in the same family-life cycle.  They developed their marketing campaign around motivating this target audience to buy and use GoPro cameras, and their super bowl ad hit a home run.  It is pretty tough to get younger men to admit they want to settle down and start a family, but GoPro did it.

GoPro paid attention to the things that tie men of this age group together, and used that to develop their tactics for conveying this message.  They realized younger men who are in the 4th and 5th family-life cycle stages (Childless Couple Stage and Family with Young Children Stage) are usually competitive by nature and enjoy watching sports.  Therefore, a Super Bowl advertisement would be a perfect time to pitch the camera to them.  Especially in a commercial that portrays GoPro’s camera as a way to show off how awesome your kid is.  Did I mention these guys are usually competitive?

Okay, I need to slow down.  I’m talking tactics before I finished explaining target audiences.  Sorry for getting ahead of myself, but how can you not get wrapped up in watching dubstep baby?  Let’s take a quick step back to target audiences.

We know that a primary target audience is the main group of people we are trying to sell our product / service to, but there are also secondary target audiences.  Secondary target audiences are a group of people, with common traits, who motivate the primary target audience to buy our product / service.  Let’s go back to last week’s example.

Last week we developed a marketing objective for a fictional company called, Western Automotive.  We said, “Western Automotive’s marketing objective is to sell more of the new smaller SUVs to ____________.”  Now let’s finish that statement.  After some market research, we have decided to finish the marketing objective with, “Western Automotive’s marketing objective is to sell more of the new smaller SUVs to young females, ages 16 to 23.”

We have chosen the primary target audience of young females, ages 16 to 23 based on their common interests and similar family-life cycle stage.  There’s no reason to include anyone under the age of 16 because they can’t drive the car anyway.  We have decided to stop the age at approximately 23 based on a prediction that many of the females older than that are moving into the next family-life cycle stage and their interests / values may change.  For instance, females who are starting families may want a larger, more spacious vehicle for their new family.  Females, ages 16 to 23, will usually be on a fairly strict budget with small expendable incomes.  This is because they range from high school students, to college students, and into the early years of their career.  Due to the small expendable income, the competitively priced small SUV could be very appealing, and the above average MPG rating would be an attractive selling point for those on a strict budget.  Also, women are typically smaller than men and often prefer a vehicle that is more size appropriate when buying the vehicle just for them.

A secondary target audience for Western Automotive’s marketing campaign could be the fathers of women, ages 16 to 23.  The fathers of the women in this age group are often very influential in the car buying process.  The smaller SUV offers many attractive safety features that a caring father would want for his “little girl”.

From the last statement, I think you can tell we are getting pretty close to developing our marketing strategy and our tactics.  We will cover the difference between strategy and tactics in next week’s post, in which we will connect our marketing objective, target audiences and proper marketing tactics.