Targeting services

Who do you exist to serve? In other words, who exactly are your organisation's target users? Your mission may specify that you work with women with breast cancer or young people with learning difficulties. But your users are not a homogenous group: they include different people with differing needs.

Segmenting your audience involves dividing up your audience into smaller groups (or segments) and identifying what each of those groups need.

Targeting involves choosing which segments to focus your energies and resources on and designing the optimal range of products or services for them.

You could also apply this technique to other stakeholders such as your volunteers and funders or donors. Find out more about your stakeholders.

How segmentation and targeting helps

Many voluntary and community organisations begin by meeting the needs of a specific group, but then expand their services to new audiences in response to perceived demand or funding opportunities. It is easy for woolly thinking to creep in, leading to the organisation's services and communications becoming either too general or incorrectly targeted.

Successful organisations understand that only a limited number of people will use their product or service. They spend time identifying exactly who these people are and what they need and prefer. 

Segmenting and targeting can help you:

• focus your limited resources by identifying your key user group(s)
• develop products that better meet the needs of users
• reduce your exposure to competition by identifying a niche for your services.

Four steps to success

Step 1. Confirm your mission and broad target users

Check that your organisation's mission and overall service area(s) are clear and up-to-date, and that the scope of your overall user group is defined.

Step 2. Segment: identify and profile the main segments within your overall target group

• Decide on the key distinction(s) within the overall target group. These could include age, gender, region, attitudes or behaviour.
• Using these distinctions, group the overall target into some meaningful segments that are mutually exclusive, meaningful and relatively stable over time.
• Estimate the approximate size, profile and preferences of each segment. If you have no data, you may need to collect some by asking your users and non-users or looking at existing research.
• Map segments onto your current services, by levels of use. 

Also consider which segments may be interested in any new services.

Step 3. Target: select which segment(s) you will prioritise

There are four main ways to decide which segments to prioritise:

• Do your organisational values imply prioritising certain segments?
• Who else provides services to these segments? Where is service provision least crowded?
• What is the cost value of meeting each of these segments' needs?
• Is work with certain segments more likely to attract funding?

Step 4. Deliver services and messages

Decide which services to deliver and promote, to which segment.

Honing services

The insights you gain will feed into new product and service development and will help to better satisfy the needs and desires of your users. This valuable information will also help your wider strategic planning process.

For an illustrative case study on segmenting and targeting your users, take a look at Achieve More magazine, issue 7.