How to Use Micromarketing to Reach Your Target Audience

Micromarketing is a type of marketing strategy that funnels its advertising efforts toward a relatively small group of targeted customers. A micromarketing campaign could focus on a specific segment of the population that a company views as potential customers. Alternatively, a target audience could be the company's existing customers, and the campaign could seek to buttress brand loyalty and solicit follow-up purchases.

Micromarketing is sometimes referred to by other names such as “target marketing” or “specialized marketing.” In all cases, it targets fewer people than a macromarketing campaign, which is aimed at a broad audience. Micromarketing strategies exploit market segmentation and advertisers' increased ability to pinpoint niche groups and individual customers—particularly via digital marketing tools like cookie-based web ads and social media campaigns.

In order to achieve its goal of sharing a message with a curated group of potential customers, a micromarketing strategy involves many steps, some of which can be time-consuming.

1. 1. Market research: To kick off its micromarketing efforts, a company must identify customer needs and the existing market competition. A startup small business cannot afford to skip over market research, lest they bring a product to market that is either redundant or irrelevant to its target audience.
2. 2. Targets and buyer personas: Next a marketing team begins describing the specific customers they imagine purchasing their product or service. To do this, many marketing plans feature a buyer persona, which is a demographic description of their perceived typical customer. Buyer personas include information like age, gender, nationality, relationship status, geographic location, personal interests, and preferred forms of media.
3. 3. Identifying goals: Once it understands the market and its target customer, a company must determine the goals of its micromarketing campaign. Such goals may include building brand awareness, driving sales of a specific new product, or grabbing market share from a competitor.
4. 4. Messaging: At this point, the micromarketing team must craft a message that will resonate with its target audience. This message will likely be more specific than the language used in a macromarketing campaign that gets beamed out to much larger populations. Language could reference quirks of local markets or specific jargon understood by hobbyists but not by the public at large.
5. 5. Content creation: Now that the marketing team has its message, it must create content that eloquently and efficiently conveys that message. Marketing can take the form of print ads, podcasts, videos, or drafted testimonials from influencers. If the micromarketing involves the product itself—such as new packaging for an existing product—that also gets created during this stage.
6. 6. Dissemination: Following the completion of market research, goal-setting, messaging, and content creation, the micromarketing campaign is ready to be shared with the world. This is where the micromarketing team—depending upon its tactics—would purchase digital ads, enlist social media influencers, release new packaging, employ street teams, and generally get the word out to its target audience.
7. 7. Study and calibration: Once the campaign launches, marketers monitor its results, looking to see if it generates the expected engagement or sales metrics. If the campaign fails to meet its goals, the marketers can tweak their strategy to better communicate with the target audience.

Micromarketing and niche marketing both involve selling goods and services to a relatively small segment of the population, but the terms are not quite synonymous. Here is the key distinction between niche marketing and micromarketing.

• Niche marketing involves products that have a naturally low level of demand. Some products, like extremely expensive luxury goods or tools pertaining to esoteric hobbies, have naturally low market demand. Companies promote these products via niche marketing, which adapts to the limits of an organically restricted marketplace.
• Micromarketing targets a specific group of people. Micromarketing does not refer to a niche demand but rather to a specialized campaign designed to reach key corners of an economy. The product itself may be of interest to the broader population, but a marketing campaign that highlights features uniquely appealing to a subset of that population would qualify as micromarketing.

In the era of digital marketing, micromarketing campaigns offer clear benefits to both small businesses and large corporations.

1. 1. Micromarketing campaigns can be cost-effective. When micromarketing campaigns target specific segments of online users, companies can find themselves spending far less money than they would on broad TV ads that go out to the entire viewing public.
2. 2. Micromarketing connects you to your target customers. If a maker of hang-gliders wanted to expand its share of the hang-glider market, it would not do the company much good to run large scale ads on network television. Rather, it would behoove the company to specifically target extreme sports enthusiasts by advertising in certain magazines, on certain websites, and via certain social media influencers. This way, the company reaches its target audience and does not waste time and money on people who would never engage with its brand.

Before diving into a campaign, business leaders and entrepreneurs should also familiarize themselves with certain cons of micromarketing.

1. 1. Micromarketers can miss out on potentially interested customers. When a marketing campaign targets a specific group of customers, it can leave out other consumers who would have been interested in a product or service but never learned about it. Micromarketing campaigns can limit the scope of a product’s appeal, and a more comprehensive campaign can build broader brand awareness.
2. 2. Micromarketing is time-intensive. While micromarketing can be cost-effective in terms of overall ad spend, such marketing efforts require a lot of time, research, and effort in order to yield meaningful results. Business leaders must factor in the value of that time and effort when budgeting a micromarketing campaign. Some companies may find they are paying less to advertising channels but that their internal staffing needs must increase in order to successfully execute a campaign.

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