What is target marketing?

A target market refers to exactly whom you believe to be the group or groups of people that will purchase your services and products. This target group must be identifiable by using various demographic and research methods. When you have identified specific target markets for your goods and services you are on your way to promoting your services to them.

We will use a fictional case study to demonstrate how John Doe targeted the sports therapy market in his geographic area.

Because John Doe wanted to build his sports massage clientele, he did a little research first to help him target this market.

John determined that he would need to define which sports groups could most use his services, what their likely ages would be and which areas of the city would most likely have potential clients that could afford his services. He also knew he needed to be able to actually GET his message to the target market.

John knew from his background in teaching martial arts that this target market could use his services as he already had great support from this market due to his teaching involvement in it. He further identified player's of soccer, football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey as a few of the sports played in his geographic area, that often produced injuries, aches and pains and who could benefit from massage therapy.  John believed that his average sports client would likely be between 14 to 35 years of age and could be either male or female.  John also decided his promotional efforts should be targeted at all areas of the city. Due to a limited budget, John decided he would forgo traditional mail flyers and related advertising and try to get his message directly to the actual sports organizations.

Here an illustration of how John targeted and promoted his services to the sports massage market:

First, John did some Internet searches on soccer in his city.  He discovered that there were five "zones" that administered organized youth soccer in the city. Logging the five youth zones websites, John searched each of them and discovered contact information for zone representatives. He detailed their email addresses in his Massage manEdger "group email" database and kept their names and phone numbers as well in the contact database.  John further discovered that there were both youth and adult zones and leagues in the city and he did the same procedure with the adult league contacts.  John continued this gathering of contact database information for each of the sports he intended to target market.

Upon completion of this database, John arranged these contacts in groups in his Massage manEdger email database. John intended to GET his message to these people.  But he knew that a little more research was in order before he crafted and delivered his message to this target market.  

John wanted to know more about his target market. Specifically, he wanted to find out what were the best advertising methods of getting his message to them.  Accordingly, John telephoned representatives of each zone and league to perform the following:

• Introduce himself and his massage therapy business, including his expertise in sports massage.
• Briefly, he explained the reason for his call. i.e. He wished to promote his services to players, parents and zone or club executives involved in this sport.
• Confirm he had the right club personnel to speak to about this, then continued to ask questions.

John discovered throughout this exercise that most zones, clubs and associations had no real ties to any massage therapy practitioners.  Generally speaking, they did not really involve themselves actively in suggesting any particular health or well being practitioners to their members.  However, while visiting the various organizations websites to get the contact information, John had noted that most had business advertisers on the sites.  John also noted that fundraising seemed to be a large interest to the zones, clubs and leagues. Continuing to ask questions, John discovered that the advertising costs to appear on the sports organization websites was reasonable; however, he also suggested to the clubs that he would be willing to exchange services for free advertising on the club websites. John found out that most of the zones and clubs held tournaments a couple times a year that relied heavily on fundraising to be successful. John suggested to various organizations that he would be willing to exchange of the proceeds from providing chair massages at the events for free club web space to put his logo and website link.

Fast forward 6 months

Some sporting clubs, districts and zones took John up on his exchange offer. John first began providing one half-day chair massages at soccer and ice hockey tournaments. Between fifty and 100 teams generally took part in each tournament and Johns' advertising exposure totaled in the thousands of persons. Charging twenty dollars for a 15 minutes chair massage, John was able to exchange about 4 hours (approximately $200) worth of massage time for one year of free advertising on the club websites. He kept a very small table near his massage chair, which had a glass bowl of complimentary mints and stacks of his business cards as well. The results have been greater than John originally anticipated. Not only does John get a large number of youth and adult clients from the zone and club website traffic, but he also receives dozens of clients who met him at the tournaments.

Fast forward 12 months

John's target market had really responded to his personal visitation and services at their prized tournament events. He had secured dozens of new regular clients. This had all been done without spending a dime on conventional advertising. 

Based on his new knowledge and comfort level within these sporting organizations he knew that there was even a lot more business to be uncovered.  Accordingly John crafted the following email and sent them out to all the sporting contacts he did not currently service, using his massage manEdger database of e-mail addresses. When John did not hear back from a club representative, he did follow up with a telephone call and was often more than pleased with the response he received. Within a short period of time, John had become a rather well known sports massage therapist in his city and had reaped the added benefit of really getting to know his target audience.