What is Micromarketing & How to Create a Scalable Micromarketing Plan?

The more you know about your customers, the better off your company will be. It’s basic business.

To address the hypercompetitive nature of today’s market, businesses must think smaller rather than larger. This is where micromarketing can help. This marketing strategy is specifically designed to address a very specific market segment within your larger target audience.

A strong micromarketing strategy can assist your company in identifying very specific pockets of people to market to. Here’s everything you need to know about putting together a scalable micromarketing strategy.

What is Micromarketing?

Micromarketing is a type of marketing that focuses on a specific segment of your customer base. These are highly targeted customers with very specific characteristics, such as location, age, interests, household income, shopping habits, or occupation. Micromarketing, in essence, targets specific individuals rather than broad groups.

A marketing agency, for example, may target small to medium-sized businesses with their product or service. They may discover, however, that the digital advertising services they provide are also appealing to small retail stores. They may decide to develop a micromarketing strategy that targets retail store owners with fewer than a certain number of employees.

Why Businesses use Micromarketing

Micromarketing is used by both large and small businesses. For example, it can be an excellent way for a large corporation to introduce new products or services, or it can assist small businesses in gaining a foothold through local advertising efforts.

Businesses use micromarketing to find a very specific market segment of the population to whom they can sell their product or service. In that regard, it is even more specific than niche marketing. If a company can match the right product or service to the right audience, it can generate a higher ROI than if they cast a wide net. Many businesses do this to test new products and advertising concepts.

When it comes to a large corporation like Coca-Cola, only a small and specific group of people within their target audience will drink a product like Diet Coke with extra caffeine and a toasted vanilla flavor. Coca-Cola has most likely used a micromarketing strategy to determine whether or not there is a market for that particular soft drink.

The Pros and Cons of Micromarketing

Before implementing this type of marketing strategy, there are a few micromarketing benefits and drawbacks to consider.

When considering micromarketing, the main disadvantage that comes to mind is how time consuming it can be. Because you are targeting a very specific group of customers, you must become intimately acquainted with them. You should also create detailed buyer personas and conduct extensive market research.

Keeping this in mind, there are some distinct advantages to running micromarketing campaigns. The ability to target these efforts is one of the most significant advantages. You’re really getting to know a specific customer based on factors such as their age or job title. With this information, you can better understand their overall requirements.

Another advantage is that micromarketing is generally less expensive than a large-scale national mass marketing campaign in terms of increasing ROI. Because you’re targeting fewer people, you’re spending less money on them.

Brands With Successful Micromarketing Strategies

There are numerous excellent examples of companies that have developed successful micromarketing strategies, each in their own unique way. We’ll highlight a few notable winners:

Coca-Cola

The Coca-Cola camp’s 2014 “Share a Coke” campaign, in which they replaced the Coca-Cola label on their 20-ounce bottles with first names, is one example of a successful micromarketing strategy. They devised a micromarketing strategy to determine which names would sell the most based on their customer base.

The personalized touch proved to be a huge success for the company, with Coca-Cola experiencing their highest-ever year-over-year growth for the 20-ounce bottle at 19 percent.

HubSpot

Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, is widely credited with coining the term “inbound marketing” in 2008. Since then, inbound marketing has become a marketing staple used by thousands of businesses worldwide. HubSpot has dominated the inbound marketing niche, creating books, a conference, and an academy centered on the concept.

HubSpot’s micromarketing strategy for creating the inbound marketing concept arose from a desire to target small to mid-sized businesses that couldn’t afford to build expensive advertising and marketing campaigns. Inbound marketing provided a low-cost solution to this problem.

Uber

Uber is one of the best examples of a company that developed highly targeted micromarketing campaigns to target specific customer needs. In fact, they did not begin as the ride-hailing service we know and love today. Uber was originally an app-based black car limo service that only served San Francisco due to the city’s taxi issues.

The news of this new service quickly spread throughout San Francisco, and other states soon followed suit. Uber created localized micromarketing campaigns that catered to those markets as they moved from state to state. This was centered on identifying specific transportation issues in various cities and states using social media data. To entice people in these markets to use the app, Uber created localized online ads with various promotions and referral benefits.

How to Create a Scalable Micromarketing Plan

There are various types of micromarketing strategies you can use for your business, but each one is based on the following critical steps:

1. Create Buyer Personas

The most important component of any successful micromarketing strategy is buyer personas. Without them, you won’t have a complete understanding of your customer base.

You must consider both quantitative and qualitative components when creating a well-rounded buyer persona.

You should pull metrics from as many data repositories as possible for the quantitative components. Google Analytics, Instagram Insights, Facebook Insights, and YouTube Analytics are some data sources to consider. These platforms can provide information about demographics, age, gender, location, and interests. The reason you want to collect this quantitative data is to gain a high-level understanding of how your current customers interact with your website and content.

Quantitative data tells you about the general characteristics of your buyer personas, whereas qualitative data is intended to help you understand what motivates those customers emotionally.

The most effective way to obtain this information is to conduct a survey or interview a predetermined number of customers. If you’re interviewing customers, you should speak with at least ten to get a good sense of the scope. Because you’ve already gathered quantitative data, it can help guide more in-depth questions like where they shop, what makes them trust a brand, and what made them feel confident in trusting your brand.

2. Determine the Most Effective Way to Reach Them

Now that you’ve determined who you’re going to market to, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to do it. When it comes to the platforms they prefer, each buyer persona you create may have different preferences. A 19-year-old college student may spend a lot of time on Instagram, whereas a 58-year-old parent may spend most of their time on Facebook. Demographic data, for example, can help you determine which platforms may be best for specific people.

It is ultimately up to you to determine the most effective way to reach out to your buyer personas. With that in mind, here are some common online ways to connect with them:

• Online ads (Google, Bing, etc.)
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok etc.)
• Podcasts (iTunes, Spotify, etc.)
• Video-streaming services (YouTube)

3. Come up With Your Messaging

Finding the right platforms to reach your target customers is one thing, but without the right messaging to convert them, it won’t do much.

This is why the qualitative component of creating buyer personas is critical — you need to understand how your personas think emotionally. Conducting interviews and noting key phrases about why they felt confident in your company is best practice. These are strong emotional purchase drivers, so using them in your advertising or organic messaging will resonate with your buyer personas.

4. Implement and Test

Because you’re using micromarketing to see what resonates with a specific audience, messaging will provide you with information on how to best convert them. When creating a Facebook ad campaign, for example, you should always create two ad variants to A/B test two different messages to see which one has a higher conversion rate. Once you’ve discovered your winning formula, you can use it in future ad campaigns to scale your micromarketing strategy.

Once you’ve put these foundational pieces in place, it’s time to launch your micromarketing campaign. Make sure you’re always testing different messages to see how your audience reacts. You can then optimize the campaign to ensure you’re getting the best ROI.

Micromarketing is all about being as specific as possible with specific members of your target audience. You want to get inside their heads and figure out what products and services they are most likely to buy.