Lizzie Lister

Lizzie has several years of experience working with content creation and management. She achieved a BA (Hons) in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, before developing a career in PR and comms.

April 28, 2022
4 minutes

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What is STP Marketing?

In our competitive digital world, capturing the attention of audiences online is increasingly challenging, and having a clear, targeted digital marketing strategy is more important than ever before, in order to cut through the noise.

STP marketing is a highly effective marketing tool that can help you to create more efficient and targeted digital marketing campaigns, resulting in improved customer engagement and ROI.

Although STP marketing can be transformative for your business, it might feel daunting to adopt a new marketing model and move from a product-focused to an audience-focused approach. In this blog, we will explain what STP marketing is, how it works and how to market your business using the STP marketing model.

STP Marketing: defined

STP marketing stands for Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning- and is a three step model that can help you to better align your marketing activities with the audiences that you are aiming to reach.

The STP marketing model works by helping you to segment your customers, decide which customer segments to target with your marketing campaigns, and finally adapt your business’ positioning to ensure it meets the needs and interests of your target market.

The three steps in the STP marketing model work together to help you define and target the market you want to reach, and are as follows:

Segmentation is where you define different groups within your target audience based on their characteristics and needs.
Targeting is where you decide which of the segments you have previously defined to focus your marketing activity on.
Positioning is the final step in the STP marketing model. This is where you take the insights you have learned from the previous two stages and look at how you can position your product or service to your target market.

Why is STP marketing important?

You may think that taking a ‘one size fits all’ approach to your marketing strategy would help you to reach the maximum number of potential customers, but the opposite is actually the case; the more you can tailor your marketing to a specific audience, the better the customer engagement and the greater the return on investment.

The STP marketing model is effective because it allows you to break down your target market and focus on how you can position your brand and personalise your marketing activities to best meet their needs.

Increasingly, personalisation is less of a ‘nice to have’ for consumers but an essential part of their decision making when it comes to purchasing, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalised experience.

By honing in on the different needs of your audience segments, you will create more personalised marketing campaigns that will give you a competitive edge over competitors using a more generic approach.

How to develop an STP marketing strategy: a step-by-step guide

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of the STP marketing strategy and why we think it should be a part of your business strategy, let’s break it down into a step-by-step guide!

1. Segment your audience

The process of market segmentation is all about identifying different segments within your target market, which helps you to develop more bespoke and effective marketing campaigns. The four main types of market segmentation are:

Demographic: age, gender, marital status etc.
Geographic: geographic location, such as the city, region or country that they live in.
Psychographic: personality traits, habits, attitudes.
Behavioural: purchasing habits, brand loyalty, interaction with a brand, time spent on your website.

How you segment your market will depend on your business strategy, but it can help to define a number of key customer groups that your business appeals to, and consider how their needs differ from one another. Some examples of audience segments could be regular or new customers, older and younger customers or customers living in different locations.

2. Chose a target segment

The next step is to decide which of the segments you have chosen to target with your marketing campaign. Depending on your business strategy, you may choose to target more than one segment at a time. Some of the key things to consider when choosing which segment to target are:

The profitability of each segment – thinking about which customer groups contribute the most to your business’ bottom line can help you decide which group to target.
The potential for growth – consider what audience segments may be key to helping you achieve your wider business strategy; for example, if your objective is to reach audiences in a new geographical location, you may want to prioritise targeting customers living in that location.
How well your business can service these groups – make sure that your business has the resources to provide a high quality product or service to a particular segment before deciding to target them in your marketing campaigns. For example, if you want to target an audience in a different geographical location or age group, your business must be able to meet the needs of this audience successfully. Conducting a SWOT analysis around targeting a particular segment can help you to identify both the risks and opportunities of pursuing a certain customer group.

3. Position your business

Once you have segmented your audience and chosen which segment to target, the final step of the STP marketing model is to successfully position your marketing activity towards your target market.

Research your competitors – especially when you are looking to target a new, or under utilisted segment, it’s important to look at what your competitors are doing to serve this group. Conduct a market analysis about what your competitors are doing well, and how you can improve elements about your own product or service offering to better meet the needs of your chosen audience.
Develop your USP – your ‘unique selling point’ is what makes your business unique, and what you can do better than anyone else. Look at your USP through the lens of different customer segments, and consider which problem your product is able to solve for them.
Meet your audiences where they are – no matter how valiant your efforts, your digital marketing strategy will fall flat if you don’t meet your audiences on the channels that they use. Make sure that you have a strong understanding of the audience you are aiming to target, including what social media channels they use, and what their key concerns are in order to achieve the desired customer engagement. For tips on what social media channels you should be using for different audiences take a look at our blog.

At Social Chameleon, we have been working with businesses to transform their digital marketing strategy for nearly a decade, and our team of experts can help you to design a marketing strategy that works for your business. Get in touch with our team at contact@socialchameleon.com, or by filling out the enquiry form on our contact page.