Whenever you start a business, some questions need to be answered. One of these questions is who you will be marketing to. Are you using a concentrated marketing strategy or opening your reach?
Deciding your target market isn’t something simple. There’s no book of instructions that you can follow to answer these tough questions.
However, a more straightforward option can make it easier for you to plan your marketing efforts. It is the choice between opting for a concentrated marketing approach or marketing to a broader, horizontal consumer base. No need to get all clueless with the jargon. Companies adopt these two marketing systems, which can be understood relatively simply.
The biggest companies that manufacture products for a wide variety of customers are the ones that have a “horizontal market.” Hence, every stage of their business, from production and marketing to distribution, is carried out on a broader scale.
On the other hand, some companies only manufacture a specific product with a focused consumer base. Such companies opt for a concentrated marketing approach.
Here are the main points of this article:
- What is Concentrated Marketing?
- Purpose of Concentrated Marketing
- Is Concentrated Marketing Right for Your Business?
- Benefits of Concentrated Marketing
- More Benefits With More Hard Work
What is Concentrated Marketing?
Concentrated marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of any size. It allows companies to focus their efforts and resources on one particular market rather than trying to capture the attention of all possible customers. This type of marketing provides better results by targeting specific audiences and ensuring that the right message is sent to the right people.
As its name implies, concentrated marketing emphasizes one particular segment or demographic within a business’s customer base. Companies can use this strategy to identify their most profitable markets and craft messages explicitly tailored toward them. With this approach, companies can build stronger relationships with their customers while also saving costs by minimizing wasted outreach efforts. Additionally, it can help increase conversions and drive higher sales growth in certain areas.
Purpose of Concentrated Marketing
The primary purpose of concentrated marketing is to direct all the crucial logs of your business toward a specified and strictly defined consumer base. All the different phases of your business need to work together to ensure you reach out to your target audience.
Many small and medium-scale companies prefer concentrated marketing because there’s a better chance of creating the brand as a specialist in the field. The target audience is limited, focused, and well-defined.
In a nutshell, a concentrated marketing system works well if your goal is to take charge of a niche market. Hence, a concentrated marketing system is your best option if you believe your product idea is worthy of solving a significant long-term problem.
Is Concentrated Marketing Right for Your Business?
It is a big decision to make for any business owner. Would you better have a focused, concentrated marketing approach or a more comprehensive one?
Becoming the go-to solution in your niche for your customers is hard work. With all the benefits the concentrated marketing approach has, it requires a lot of effort.
For instance, it allows you to thoroughly study consumer behavior as your target audience is much more focused. Simultaneously, it is not one of the most straightforward tasks to read consumer behavior and develop ideas that meet it.
Similarly, the highly targeted approach of concentrated marketing gives you a better return on investment in advertising. With a limited target audience, you can better understand the messages you must put out there to attract those eyeballs. Furthermore, a close study of consumer behavior is sure to back you up in devising a long-term concentrated marketing strategy as well.
Now that you know the benefits back the concentrated marketing approach let’s move on to the critical part. How do you get started with concentrated marketing? What are the crucial aspects that will prove undeniably vital to the success of your strategy? As mentioned above, the concentrated marketing strategy can work wonders but only if it is done right.
Getting Started With Concentrated Marketing
All the dedication and hard work put into standing out as a specialist in your niche won’t pay off if it isn’t done smartly. But what does wise mean when it comes to concentrated marketing? Let’s find out the most critical steps you need to know to get started with focused marketing.
Let’s find out the most critical steps you need to know to get started with concentrated marketing.
Research
When it comes to any marketing strategy, solid research is what you need to get started. You must thoroughly examine the needs you are willing to fulfill and clearly define your customer personas.
Once you’re done with the “who” part of your target audience, you need to have a definite “why.” It would require an in-depth analysis to come up with your customer’s persona in touch with reality. Research is that part of your VMS that should not be taken lightly. It is the foundation for your strategies, so make sure it isn’t shaky or incomplete.
Content
Once you’re done with defining your buyer persona, it is time to move on to planning the content. What messages are you going to rely on to convert potential buyers?
Remember, the content needs to be well-tailored to fit perfectly in your niche but simultaneously stand apart from the crowd. From clearly defining your USPs to being consistent with the tone of voice you wish to market in, your content should perfectly complement your business’s “why” and make it convenient for potential buyers to understand.
Visibility
You can collaborate with distributors more efficiently in a concentrated marketing approach than with horizontal markets.
You need to know online and offline spaces where your target audiences spend a lot of their time. You have to be a lot more visible in these places. Only then will your well-crafted content get you the intended results.
Another benefit of opting for a concentrated marketing system is that a focused market makes it easier for you to plan and execute your strategy’s three phases. A limited target audience makes the research a lot more narrow and focused. Similarly, crafting content relevant to your target audience and putting it out there in the space where it matters gets easier.
Developing a Sound Strategy
When you’ve figured out your target customer and you have a clear message that you want to send out there, it is time to be out there at the right place, at the right time. After all, even with the best research and great content, it’s hard to get the desired results if your strategy isn’t up to the mark.
So, let’s get right into the planning and execution of your strategy.
Zero In on Your Channels
First, you must be as transparent as possible about the channels where your sales messaging will be the most effective. For instance, some industries have newsletters or periodicals that are household names among all stakeholders. Finding space for your brand on such channels will boost your company’s much-needed reputation.
Event Marketing for B2B
When you have a concentrated market, you want to reach out to people looking for experts in the niche. Event marketing is a handy tool to invite your target audience segments and build your brand’s name as an industry specialist. Primarily, for B2B leads, event marketing is sure to attract a healthy number of leads for you.
Find the Right People
When you enter an industry, there are always people on your list who exert a lot of influence. It can be influencers themselves or the top distributors. All you need to do is make sure you find ways to work with the best among them. This is how your brand will slowly begin to get the attention it needs to be established as a trusted name.
Take Help of Storytelling
When establishing your brand as an industry specialist, telling valuable stories becomes very important. You can use case studies to present the social proof of your ability to serve and fulfill industry-specific needs.
The goal of putting out these stories is to show your consumer base that you know and care about their needs and are willing to work hard to fulfill them. After all, concentrated marketing is all about identifying and interacting with your focused target audience.
Review Your Execution
As your concentrated marketing strategy is executed, make sure you keep reviewing it. See what content is proving useful and what isn’t as impactful. The channels that have boosted your brand’s reputation and those that haven’t been as helpful.
You can mold your strategy whenever and howsoever necessary by continually checking the progress. Also, you will keep getting new insight into consumer behavior and any changes it goes through.
Right Content to the Right People
When you wish to become an industry specialist, your content becomes essential. But to stand out in your content, avoid generic industry-related stuff. Try to spot topics that concern your buyer persona and craft your content around them.
Furthermore, try to make your content as easy to understand as possible. After all, your goal is not to draft the most impeccable content with a lot of jargon. It should be easy to interact with your target audience.
Don’t just create content to get credit for being clever — create content that will be helpful, insightful, or interesting for your target audience. — David Ogilvy
Concentrated Marketing starts with you knowing all about the people you want to sell to. If done right, it ends with your target audience knowing what you offer and how committed your brand is to anticipating, identifying, and solving their problems.
The only way to do this is through impactful content that speaks to your customers and considers their unvoiced opinions and concerns. As they say, marketing is all about telling honest stories that appeal to your target audience.
Benefits of Concentrated Marketing
There are many benefits of adopting Concentrated Marketing for a business with a more focused goal regarding what they sell and why they sell it. Let’s discuss it in detail:
1. Brand Establishment
When you choose to go for concentrated marketing, it becomes much easier to establish your brand by targeting a specific audience. Similarly, when you focus your marketing on a limited number of industries, your target audience is select and well-defined.
This gives more value to your marketing efforts and inspires a sense of trust in your consumer base. In turn, you can quickly identify and target the most profitable customers when your market is narrow.
2. Better Understanding of Customers
When your business has a concentrated market, your sales messaging gets sharper. You have better insight into your customer’s needs as they’re much more compact. This makes it easier for you to prepare your message for your customers and increase your conversion chances. Understanding any industry’s nuances is handy when targeting and selling to a certain kind of customer.
3. Better Opportunities
When your market is more focused, it gives you the lead in developing new services and products. You will anticipate unmet needs and develop solutions if you understand your particular industry correctly.
This head starts that industry experts don’t belong to companies with a horizontal market.
4. Solid Networking
Reaching out to key players within the industry also gets a lot easier when you have a concentrated market and your focus is narrower. Identifying and reaching out to the most significant influencers will take you a step ahead of the competition.
5. Well-Defined Marketing Plan
Every industry has its unique needs that your business needs to fulfill to succeed. These needs are much more discernible when you begin with a narrow market.
Your marketing efforts in all stages are directed towards a defined goal and according to a well-crafted plan. On the other hand, the spray-and-pray horizontal approach makes it hard to pinpoint such vital factors and devise the strategy according to them.
6. Fewer Competition
Another benefit of opting for concentrated marketing is the lack of quality competition. The narrower your market, the more specific will be the needs that your product is intended to fulfill. This would mean that fewer companies would make the same product, and with the right product, you’re more likely to succeed and rise above the little competition at hand.
That said, it isn’t as easy to make a name for yourself to reach a point where you are the only competition. The few competitors you will have will be experts like you.
7. Product Specialization
With concentrated markets, there are a lot of opportunities for companies to bring in specialized products to meet industry needs.
It would also give the company an idea regarding the kind of customer they want to market to. From production to marketing and distribution, concentrated markets make it easier for companies to make a reputation for themselves in their industry.
8. Benefits of Being Industry Experts
Lastly, from the customer’s perspective, there is an increased willingness to look for experts in the field while purchasing and building a trusted market.
In a nutshell, there indeed are benefits of concentrated marketing. Especially when it comes to advertising and sales messaging, it makes things way more productive and manageable. Yet, the question remains whether or not it is suitable for your business. After all, every company has its own needs and should be marketed accordingly.
More Benefits With More Hard Work
Compared to the broader approach that big corporations take, the concentrated marketing approach will give you a better shot at achieving no need to get all clueless with the jargon. much the desired result.
When you’re so focused and specific with your target audience, you cannot afford not to reach the right people. To ensure you do, every phase of your strategy, starting from research to distribution, has to be done right.
Becoming the go-to brand within your niche requires a perfect mixture of planning, patience, and perseverance. Now that you know how useful this approach can be, you must figure out whether you wish to go for it. If you’re already convinced, go ahead and start with your research.
After all, substantial research lays the foundation for your concentrated marketing strategy.
Christian has over ten years of experience in marketing agencies. Currently, he has been dedicating his time to a tech startup and also writing for major publications. He loves podcasts and reading to keep up with the latest trends in marketing.
I think if you have a low budget that’s the way to go!
That’s right, Bradley. A concentrated marketing strategy focuses your spending on a niche, and although you reach fewer people, it’s much more efficient. Thanks for the comment!