STP: Deliver The Right Content to The Right Customers

Your business wants as many customers as possible. Ideally, you’d create content that appeals to every possible customer, but that would entail infinite unique customizations that aren’t feasible-even for the biggest global brands. Instead, the right approach is segmentation, targeting, and positioning, or how your brand carves out its space in the marketplace. With the right approach to STP, your brand can deliver the right content to the right customers at the right time. That means a lower customer acquisition cost, higher customer lifetime value, and a more fruitful overall marketing strategy. 

What STP Means For Your Business

There are myriad ways of breaking your overall customer base into clusters. You can group by demographics, like age or gender; psychographics like customer values and lifestyles; or behaviors, like shopping frequency or coupon use. Each way of segmenting your customers has its own merit, but arguably the most effective is grouping by behavioral tendencies. After all, the best predictor for future behavior is past behavior. Once you have an idea of how your customer base is grouped, you’ll know which groups have the most potential to target. 

Your business can then use that behavioral, demographic, or psychographic data to develop content targeted toward that segment, which means more customer acquisition and retention. Customers want to do business with brands who understand them; their values, interests, and behaviors. One way to target customers based on their behavior is to offer loyalty programs. Not only will you appeal to your best customers, but you’ll gain insight into who those customers are. Interestingly enough, over three-quarters of businesses fail to target customers based on behavioral data, which means there’s an opportunity in the marketplace for your business!

Once you’ve got your customers segmented and you know how to target them, all that’s left to do is position your own brand. What makes your product or service better than the other available options. In other words, why should customers buy from you? Some brands position themselves as the low-cost, economy option. Others take pride in being the expensive, high-quality choice. However you position your brand, it should make sense given how your customer base is segmented. For example, if your customer base is primarily low-income, it wouldn’t make sense to position your brand as the expensive, high-quality choice. 

How to Implement Your STP Strategy

If you haven’t noticed already, the fundamentals of segmentation, targeting, and positioning are all intertwined. You can’t target the right customers without segmenting them, and you can’t do either without positioning your brand effectively. At the same time, each independent principle hinges upon one another. Furthermore, they all depend upon the access to and analysis of marketing data like sales figures. The more robust your data management systems, the better understanding you’ll have of how to configure STP for your business. 

Once you have your STP strategy, the next step is to implement it into your marketing mix. That means implementing your segmentation, targeting, and positioning separately. In terms of segmentation, identify and profile your segments. This can often be achieved through detailed data analysis or buyer personas. Understand not only how to best segment your customers, but how to understand which segments offer the most in terms of potential customer value. 

When you’ve figured out which segments are most valuable to your long-term strategy, you’ll be able to develop the content that appeals to them. What’s more, you’ll be able to develop product positioning for each segment. For example, say you’ve identified your main customer segments and figured out what appeals to them. Where you can take it a step further is tweaking how you present the strengths of your business. If your target segment craves more feature-rich products, point out everything your product or line of products can do. More shrewd customers might want to hear how your product lasts longer or costs less. How you position your brand will impact which customers will be interested in what you have to offer. 

The Not-So-Secret Digital Marketing Weapon

Part of implementing your marketing mix inherently involves deciding when, where, and how to deliver your content. That’s where behavioral analysis becomes so important; understanding your customers’ patterns, like social media usage or spending habits, can help you understand which forms of advertising drive them to do what they do.

In a nutshell, the right STP strategy helps your brand deliver the right content to the right folks at the right time. It’s the digital marketing (not so secret) weapon that will help you make the most of your relationships with your customers and build your brand into a household name.