Targeted Marketing Design

Article Published: Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 4:34 pm | Subscribe

Targeted Marketing Design, you’re probably wondering – what is this? It’s been a topic that has been rolling around our offices often lately – it’s just that no one really knows it yet. Now I might have you slightly confused, but I promise to explain. Targeted Marketing Design is something I believe to have innovatively conceived as I’ve been expanding my Internet Marketing knowledge. What I would call, Traditional Targeted Marketing Design is something you see every day, it’s the branding put on cereal boxes that attract the eyes of children in the supermarket. It’s the Jo-Ann fabric commercials on lifetime (not that I would know). It’s the glittery lettering put on rap albums in the 90′s to attract it’s targeted market. It’s all of these things, but it’s also so much more, it’s deeper and more subliminal but effective.

In web design so many techniques and practices go into the overall design approach to make it an effective marketing tool in the 21st century. I commonly get to teach and educate my clients on the importance of not just designing their project around their own personal tastes and desires, but more importantly what is going to be effective for the clients target market. What does that mean exactly? Well let’s say you’re a middle aged male that owns a beauty salon, through market research you learn that 83% of your clientele are women between the ages of 17 and 60, you’re probably not going to use heavy bold fonts and metallic colors with stock or professional photography of architecture and sports teams. To develop an effective internet marketing campaign you must keep your target market at the forefront of your design strategy and final implementation. To begin you would incorporate such tools and practices as gathering focus groups to determine properties like desired font styles and color schemes as well as keyword analysis to understand your approach to SEO and possibly AdWords campaigns. These are proactive solutions to establishing a successful marketing strategy but also for saving money and time in the long run.

In the beginning of this article I explained that Targeted Marketing Design is something that has been rolling around our offices lately.  We are developing some powerful internet marketing software that, for the most part, is an untapped market in and of itself.  This project has been a learning experience for not only the software designers and engineers like myself on the project, but also for those funding it and coordinating it.  We’ve learned over the past few months of development as we have struggled to create an interface that is seamless and easy to use for the end user that, there is a much bigger picture that we may be missing.  Without going into too much detail without giving away what the software actually does, I must say that it’s core user audience is marketers, designers, developers and entrepreneurs.  Knowing this we have spent the majority of our time tweaking it’s usability to suit those types of individuals.  As of recently it dawned on me that, again, we might be missing the bigger picture.   Even though it is of vital importance that this market group must possess the ability to effectively use this product, what they churn out must be able to identify with their core target market. For example, a company can design quality art supplies designed to be used by artists but if the artists themselves cannot create artwork suited for their fans and target audience then the results yielded are unsuccessful.

Here are a few tips and ideas to help your project design be successful whether it be print, web or digital.

• First and foremost, remember, although you will need to be satisfied with the overall project design, you must determine your Target Market and design accordingly. You might have to give up some personal preferences to make your product/project successful.
• If you’re hiring an outside Designer, Developer or Firm agency, they are probably going to use language like “Get your products/services seen!” as part of their slogan or gimmick, Don’t be afraid to ask them how exactly they are going to help you be successful. Just having something developed and thrown up on the internet isn’t exactly going to yield results. Take notes and compare them with other possibilities.
• Before you begin sketching mock-ups for your product or project design, do some market research to determine your target market/audience.
• Once you have determined your market demographic, do some research and find out what kinds of design trends are popular within that demographic.
• Also, make a list of things that you know will turn your audience away from your product/project.

  For example, through market research we have discovered that people over the age of 50 typically don’t prefer heavy flash animation in web design, it’s too busy and can make for difficulty finding content or information they are looking for, but it is also harder to read and keep track of.

• Gather a focus group! Find some people that match your core demographic and ask them what they think, this is very important.

  Sometimes we let our pride get in the way of our success. We feel that our idea alone is going to make tons of money and possibly out of fear we deny putting it in front of a Jury of our peers, But this is critical for success.

Article Posted Under: Design, Featured, Internet Marketing