Who’s your dream client? For many entrepreneurs and small business owners, the first answer is “everybody!”
While it’s awesome to dream big, a vision of serving the entire planet with your fantastic products or services is hard to realize — at least at first. Marketing professionals often encourage you to start with a very narrow concept of your target audience. The idea is that it’s easier to connect to a small group rather than a larger one.
However, if you’ve already managed to convert a narrow group of prospects into loyal customers, you’re ready for the next step. You’re ready to tap into the power of a diverse target market.
What is a diverse target market?
A diverse target market comes from an advanced marketing strategy involving brainstorming more than one target group who may be interested in becoming customers of your business. When you employ this concept, you can strategically expand your reach into new demographics with different backgrounds. Your prospective audience can grow in targeted and smart ways — leading you to that goal of “everyone” step by step.
To understand the importance of diversity in modern business, consider a case study of the Rochester Lilac Festival. The organizers know that the people who attend this event aren’t just interested in flowers. They may want to see top-tier musical performances or check out some of the local vendors.
In an effort to reach a diverse target audience, the festival team created a sign-up form that let subscribers choose their interests and notification preferences. In this way, only pertinent news arrives in a person’s inbox, reducing the number of unsubscribes and keeping the excitement going for the Lilac Festival and other events throughout the year.
By diversifying the target audience, small business owners are, in effect, creating an inclusive marketing initiative. This drives business growth because it’s easier to adjust your messaging to create new offers, products, or services that speak specifically to different segments of your community. You’ll have a stronger understanding of your varied customer base, which allows for even more growth opportunities.
Understanding diverse target markets
Many marketing strategists recommend a narrow target audience because it’s easier to succeed in audience engagement. This is when your prospective customers voluntarily interact with your business messaging, and it’s the foundation for creating strong relationships and brand loyalty.
But engagement is possible with diversity, too — if you are strategic. Let’s start the process by getting a better idea of the role diversity can play in attracting a wider audience.
Defining diversity in marketing
Diversity in marketing means identifying numerous buyer personas that reasonably have an interest in your products and services. This often means reaching out to marginalized and frequently overlooked communities including gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation minorities.
When brainstorming your buyer personas, you can also consider:
- Demographic information such as age and income level
- Geographic location
- Psycho-social data such as cultural preferences, buying intent, or hobbies
- Pain points that your business can help alleviate
Benefits of reaching broader audience segments
Having a diverse target market strategy is powerful because it allows you to identify and speak to different segments of your prospects with targeted marketing campaigns. What’s more, you may discover overlaps in messaging that connect with a broader audience.
When you identify these new audiences, you can create new marketing strategies that connect. For example, you can build a successful Facebook Ad campaign to reach different segments of your audience. You’re reaching a broader audience in a smarter way.
Breaking down demographic barriers
As you begin the process of brainstorming different audiences to broaden your reach, try not to operate completely within separate silos. Instead, think about natural overlaps that can help to break down demographic barriers.
For example, let’s say you run a flower shop. Most of your customers are men buying holiday gifts for their wives, but you want to connect with a larger audience. You can break down the barrier of sexual orientation if you create an email marketing campaign for the LGBTQ+ community in your area.
Expanding market potential
The reason to go through this extra effort of diversifying your target audience is to expand your market reach and sales potential when you connect with a larger audience.
When you create campaigns that speak to broader populations, you can often discover a better return on investment (ROI). Taking the time to get clear about your audience makes it more likely to achieve success.
Economic impact of diversity marketing
Speaking of ROI and profitability, let’s take a closer look at the economic impact of diversity marketing. The financial reasons for expanding your perception of your clientele are clear.
Financial advantages of inclusive strategies
Inclusive strategies work to grow business. Look at the industry-specific averages for opens, clicks, and bounces in the Constant Contact Knowledge Base to see how your baseline compares. Then, as you grow your reach using a more inclusive and diverse market, you can measure the impact by focusing on your conversion rate. Tracking this metric can show you the financial advantage of expanding your business potential in real-time.
Market size and purchasing power of diverse communities
It’s worth noting that diversity doesn’t just refer to including minorities or other marginalized groups in your marketing campaigns. Instead, think of diversity as a simple expansion of your market size.
Still, this expansion often includes targeting some groups with the socio-economic status you may not have first considered — and with this expansion comes some impressive purchasing power. Black Americans are projected to have $1.7 trillion in purchasing power by 2030, while Hispanic Americans are already bringing in $3.2 trillion into the American economy, according to Time Magazine.
Competitive edge through inclusivity
When you create social media and other marketing campaigns for a broader audience, you’ll get an edge over your competitors. This is another way of explaining why “everyone” isn’t a good answer for your target audience: If you don’t speak directly to different kinds of people, you risk speaking to no one at all.
If you create inclusive marketing campaigns, these diverse populations will start to recognize and appreciate your brand over your competition. When your new diverse target market knows you care about them, they’ll be more likely to do business with you.
Case studies of successful diverse marketing
Another case study for diverse marketing comes from the U.S. Black Chambers, which considers themselves the Voice of Black Business. Their target audience may seem narrow, but the reality is that there is great diversity within the context of black business owners.
They used personalization techniques and interactive e-newsletters to grow their subscriber contact list by an impressive 13% in just a year. They also utilized email list segmentation to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Strategies for developing a diverse target market
Here are four effective strategies as you begin to brainstorm and diversify your target audience:
1. Conduct comprehensive market research
Use the reach of all your digital marketing channels to learn more about your current audience and the gaps in your reach. For example, send a survey to your email subscribers, connect on different social platforms, and use SMS text messaging to gain a deeper understanding of your current audience.
2. Identify underserved customer segments
Once you know whom you are serving with your products and services, you can consider areas of the population that you haven’t yet reached. Look back at the different elements of a target audience to see if you’re missing specific demographics, pain points, psycho-social groups, or other communities.
3. Develop culturally sensitive marketing approaches
Next, you can create marketing campaigns for these new segments of the population. It’s important to stay culturally appropriate, which can be a struggle when first trying to connect with a new audience. Browse the Be a Marketer podcast to get new ideas about ways to resonate with broader audiences within different cultures.
4. Create inclusive brand messaging
Be sure you aren’t simply catering to one group with your marketing campaign but creating a more inclusive brand message. That is, again, don’t just operate within silos. Look at all your branding materials, including your website, social media, and listing pages to ensure your messaging can connect to a broad audience.
Overcoming challenges in diversity marketing
It can be tough to address buyer personas you haven’t normally addressed. It can feel like speaking a new language! Here are some tips to help you stay focused on success.
Common misconceptions about diverse markets
People are individuals, even if they are the same demographically. Two people from the same socio-economic background, with the same ethnicity, living in the same neighborhood may have very different pain points and interests. When you embark on a marketing strategy to reach diverse markets, take care not to paint with too broad a brush.
Avoiding stereotypes
That said, you need to be even more careful about falling back on stereotypes — especially if your campaign includes humor. You can easily offend someone by presuming they feel a certain way just because the media portrays people like them in a certain light. Always remember that your customers are people with feelings. If you’re unsure about how a message will resonate, gather a diverse group to provide feedback before publishing anything.
Authentic representation strategies
Authenticity is the key to success with diversity marketing. After all, marketing is simply a way to build customer relationships. If your brand dramatically changes its messaging in a way that doesn’t ring true, it won’t just be your new diverse prospects that will get turned off. You’ll risk alienating your current customer base. Especially in this age of social media marketing and digital tools, your message should always reflect your authentic brand values.
Digital tools for targeting diverse markets
The tools and strategies used for diverse markets are the same for any expanding target audience. Let’s review them, so you can focus on the methods as well as the message.
Analytics for understanding diverse audiences
Always start with the end in mind. As you create a marketing campaign for an emerging audience, determine your goal and the corresponding key performance indicator (KPI) metrics to track. You may notice that certain platforms perform better than others, so stay dynamic and data-driven throughout your campaign.
Personalization technologies
As mentioned, people within certain social groups are individuals — and you can respect this by following the personalization trend in marketing. Use automation to learn your prospects’ interests and preferences, refine your message, and increase your conversions.
Building an inclusive brand identity
To stay authentic, reflect your broadening target audience within the whole of your brand identity. Start with the values on which you’ve built your business and grow from there.
Develop diverse marketing teams
If you want to reach out to a new demographic, you may want to employ new people who represent this new group. The more you can hear directly from your diverse target market, the easier it will be to hit the mark. Plus, the more diverse your team is, the more likely you will represent — and respect —multiple perspectives within your marketing campaigns.
Create inclusive visual and written content
You can demonstrate a commitment to diversity by creating content that is inclusive to different groups. Be sure your messaging resonates both in text and visually. People want to see people who look like them just as they want to be spoken to in a way they understand.
Future of diverse target markets
Expanding your target audience requires creative thinking. You must consider the demographics and social groups that have yet to be engaged in your marketing campaigns. Taking a big-picture perspective, with the help of a diverse marketing team, can help you expand your reach and grow your business.
You’ll need more than just thinking outside the box, though. Technological innovations in inclusive marketing, such as data-driven analytics, targeted advertisements, and email list segmentation, can help you meet evolving consumer expectations and prepare for a more connected world. As a first step, do the work to define your current target audience. You may want to create a survey to send through email to learn more about who you already connect with. You can use this customer feedback to find opportunities for expansion and fresh ideas.
