The Importance of Audience Segmentation

As a media planner I’ve had the opportunity to work on all types of plans across a wide variety of client types.  We’re talking B2B to B2C, traditional to emerging media, and client industries ranging from healthcare to manufacturing to technology.  One thing that is always important across all these types is understanding the target audience.  Where does your target audience spend time?  What media do they consume?  What interests them?  Understanding these variables plus several others will help marketers eliminate wasteful spending.  Ads will be delivered to relevant, qualified eyeballs.

An increasing important audience segment is the Hispanic population.

The Hispanic population recently surpassed African Americans as the largest minority in the United States. This is an extremely important shift to understand as it has implications to how marketing and media plans are developed.  The significance of this can be seen as we consider planning for the building products category.

As of 2007, there were an estimated 690,000 Hispanic-owned businesses in the construction, repair and maintenance industries. By 2008, over 30% of the workforce in the above industries were Hispanic. As if that stat wasn’t amazing enough, in the next 15 years, that number is expected to more than double and reach 63.2%. What does all of this mean? Building product manufacturers have a huge opportunity, however few have campaigns that focus entirely on this audience.

Hispanic-owned businesses are generally located in 3 areas of the U.S. – California, Florida and Texas. Considering that these 3 states include over 50% of the total Hispanic population in the U.S., it makes perfect sense that those same 3 states would have the highest percentages in Hispanic owned businesses.

Through our media planning experience we’ve identified several benefits to developing plans that focus on the Hispanic marketplace.  First, because the media is still emerging, it is generally more efficient than the equivalent, mainstream outlets. Next, because of the concentration of the audience in a three-state geography, a regional advertising plan to these states can be implemented.  This reduces the dependency on larger national media that carries a premium and has less targeting to offer.  Finally, the ad market is down.  This is true across most segments including the Hispanic market.

This is a great time for building product manufacturers to develop Hispanic focused marketing programs and conduct outreach to this ever-important audience.

I’ve garnered several insights having developed many media plans that focused significant portions of the budget to reach Hispanics. First, relationships matter. If you can develop a trusting relationship with the Hispanic audience your budget will gain efficiency.  Next, the Hispanic audience has demonstrated brand loyalty that exceeds the loyalty found in other segments. If building product manufacturers are successful at building and maintaining relationships now with the audience, they could see a substantial reward for doing so over the several years.

Building product manufacturers have an opportunity at hand to develop plans that reach out directly to the Hispanic contractor, construction companies and allied trades.  Contact us to find out how Point to Point can help with your media planning and buying or audience segmentation efforts.

Flickr photo courtesy of atomicShed