Target Marketing involves breaking a market into segments and then concentrating your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments.

Target marketing can be the key to a small business’s success.

The beauty of target marketing is that it makes the promotion, pricing and distribution of your products and/or services easier and more cost-effective. Target marketing provides a focus to all of your marketing activities.

So if, for instance, I open a catering business offering catering services in the client’s home, instead of advertising with a newspaper insert that goes out to everyone, I could target my market with a direct mail campaign that went only to particular residents.

While market segmentation can be done in many ways, depending on how you want to slice up the pie, three of the most common types are:

• Geographic segmentation – based on location such as home addresses;

• Demographic segmentation – based on measurable statistics, such as age or income;

• Psychographic segmentation – based on lifestyle preferences, such as being urban dwellers or pet lovers.