As direct marketing experts, we use a mixture of various medias to develop compelling messaging for our clients. A significant part of campaign development is identifying and defining the target audience. This is often based on an understanding of current clients, and their preferences and behaviors.
A recent campaign reminded me of the complexity, and dynamic nature of targeting. As part of the project, we conducted outbound calls to confirm their understanding of the program. Throughout the calls, we asked questions and listened to responses. We also discussed our calls with each other, and identified similar behaviors and characteristics.
This led to more questions, so we analyzed outreach, clustering, and response characteristic across fifteen demographic attributes. From the results, we developed marketing personas, and a market penetration index (MPI) for each demographic criterion, which would be incorporated into messaging, targeting and micro-segment efforts.
Here are a few secrets to our targeting:

• Develop marketing personas: Define in-depth, lifelike characteristic traits, to help develop content and marketing.
• Analyze response: Dig deep and look at a multitude of characteristics and preferences of respondents, include demographic and psychographic behaviors.
• Understand market penetration: Develop an understanding of how your respondents relate to the target market, and weight your targeting accordingly.
• Develop micro-segments: Create micro-campaigns based on MPI that speak personally to your recipients trigger points.
• On-going Analysis: Develop an on-going practice of analyzing campaign responses, messaging and targeting.

If you’re interested in learning about your targeting opportunities, feel free to contact me for a no-obligation conversation.