Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Marketing Circle: Targeting

Introduction

Targeting is a key activity in the marketing circle and a central concept in marketing. Having a target market keeps our efforts focused and relevant. A target will prevent us from becoming distracted by other activities that don't advance our objectives. Targeting is central to marketing success.

When you select a target market, you are deciding where most of your marketing resources are going for a specified period of time, so you will want to ensure that you make the effort to make the right choice.

Target Segmentation

The first step toward developing a target market is deciding who your markets are. Literacy agencies typically have five main market groups: learners or students, partners, volunteers, funders, and the community at large. You may decide you have more than five, and that's fine.

Market segmentation means dividing a market group into subsets (segments) that have similar characteristics. Let's take the market group, “learners”, as an example. One segment of this larger group may be learners with independence goals. Another may be students who wish to go to college. Still another might be single parents. These segments are very broad and you may wish to further subdivide them; however, you can easily see how marketing to these two segments would require very different approaches.

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