Every PR professional out there needs to employ the most effective marketing strategies if they want to protect their clients’ competitiveness, grow their profits, retain their hard-won customers, and, ultimately, strengthen their brand reputation.
But with such a wide range of options available and so much hype around some of them—like influencer marketing, for example—how do PR experts like you even get started?
One of the most effective and complete marketing strategies that you should consider is STP marketing. If you’re asking yourself what that is and would like to get more familiar with it, keep reading this extensive guide.
Here, we’ll discuss what STP marketing is, how it works in practice, and the main benefits of STP marketing that you stand to gain.
Let’s dive in!
Understanding STP marketing
STP marketing simply refers to the three pillars of this marketing approach: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning. Because it focuses on such critical elements, STP is a comprehensive, effective, and powerful marketing technique, whether you want to use it for B2B lead generation, account-based marketing strategies, or anything else.
Through this marketing model, businesses can design, develop, and deliver hyper-relevant and personalized messages to target and engage with specific audiences, while also presenting their brand in a uniquely recognizable and memorable way, thus boosting brand reputation.
As we will see later on in our guide, the STP marketing tactic follows three different, consecutive stages. The process begins by segmenting your customers, moving on to targeting the best and most profitable segment. Finally, it ends with effective positioning, which enables marketers to carve out a specific position for their brand’s products or services in order to stand out from the competition.
When handled properly, this three-pronged approach can be incredibly successful. Let’s take a look at how you can master each step of the process, before delving into its benefits.
Customer segmentation
Segmenting your customer base is the first step of the STP marketing process. It allows you to obtain much more clarity on who your customers are, what they want and expect from your brand, and how you can fulfil their needs with ad-hoc, targeted messaging.
There are many criteria you can use to segment your customer base, but these are the most common ones:
- Geography: You can segment your customers according to where they are based. This can be as generic as their country, or as specific as their exact location or neighborhood.
- Demographics: Break down your customer base by age, gender, marital status, income, education, profession, and, in the case of B2B businesses, company size and revenue.
- Behavior: How do your customers behave when interacting with your brand? Which channels do they use the most? Are they involved in any loyalty or referral program? How do they react to your marketing campaigns?
- Psychography: This factor looks at the personality and emotions that your customers showcase through their purchase behaviors; these illuminate things like their lifestyle, interests, passions, and more.
Targeting
Now that you have divided up your customer base according to the criteria explained above, it’s time to decide which segment to target. The idea is not too dissimilar from lead scoring. What is lead scoring? It’s the practice of assigning a score or mark to a particular lead in order to identify the most promising ones.
To evaluate which customer groups it will be worth pursuing, you can consider the following elements:
- Size: To ensure you gain all the benefits of STP marketing, you need a fairly sizeable cohort of customers to work with.
- Reachability: How easy is it for your sales and marketing teams to access and pursue the segments you have identified? Choose those that are easy to reach and engage.
- Profitability potential: How lucrative is the segment you intend to target? Ideally, it should have a low or medium customer acquisition cost (CAC) and simultaneously be able to deliver high returns.
Positioning
At this point, you are all set to move ahead with the final stage of the STP approach: positioning. Here, you harness all the insights you gained from the previous two stages and work out how you’re going to position your brand to attract your chosen audience.
Now is the perfect time to focus on your brand’s products or services and their value. At this stage, you perform things such as market and competitor analysis, craft your unique value proposition, and dig deep into customer intelligence (read this if you want a quick and easy way to define customer intelligence for your sales and marketing reps).
One of the best positioning strategies is creating a Product Positioning Map. This is a visual aid that plots both your brand and your competitors within your market of reference based on specific features and customer perceptions.
Image sourced from antmurphy.me
8 core benefits of STP marketing
What are the main benefits of STP marketing that you can expect to achieve? Below you’ll find a list with eight of them.
1) Enhanced personalization
One of the main reasons for using an STP approach is its strong personalization drive. Every single marketing message that you put out into the world will be extremely customized to the exact segment you’re targeting, thus hitting that all-important sweet spot that makes lookers turn into customers and customers into advocates.
2) Resource optimization
Yes, the power of SEO, the potential of generative AI, and the engagement capabilities of social media are all amazing for your marketing strategy, but they also require a ton of resources. With STP marketing, you can stop wasting time trying out different tactics that might or might not work and instead focus on what the data tells you, which helps you optimize your resources for greater success.
3) Higher return on investment (ROI)
A targeted, relevant, and engaging campaign created through an STP marketing model is much more likely to resonate with its audience, which in turn means that people are much more eager to discover—and buy—that particular product or service. The bottom line? Higher return on your initial investment.
4) Boosted customer satisfaction and engagement
An STP approach lets you leverage the most effective content marketing techniques, such as brand storytelling, UGC, and blog posts, to target the right audience. By doing so, you’ll find that customers feel seen, heard, and valued. In turn, this dramatically enhances their engagement and turns them into happy customers.
5) Higher efficiency
One of the most crucial aspects of an STP marketing strategy is its laser-focused efficiency. Because you zoom into hyper-specific customer segments and target them with the most relevant, informative, and compelling content exclusively designed for them, you’ll be able to vastly maximize the impact and performance of your campaigns.
6) Better product development
STP marketing is not just great for your marketing campaigns—it can supercharge other crucial areas of your business, too, like product development. This happens because STP marketing uncovers exactly who your audience is, what they want, and how you can deliver to them precisely what they are looking for.
7) Deeper customer insights
When you’re segmenting your customer base, you can unearth hyper-specific insights into different aspects that characterize each group. This helps you design and launch marketing campaigns that speak to the hearts of your customers in the most genuine, relevant, and engaging way, thus boosting trust, loyalty, and retention.
8) More robust brand reputation
Brand reputation is a vital aspect for all companies serious about thriving in today’s ultra-competitive landscape and is tightly connected to brand positioning.
A solid, authentic, and clear brand positioning helps reinforce your reputation as an authoritative, trustworthy, and dedicated brand, and that’s exactly what STP marketing allows you to achieve.
Best practices for a winning STP marketing strategy
Whether you want to grow your business, overtake your fiercest rivals, or launch a new product or service to the market, an STP strategy can help. Below, we’ll delve deeper into the steps we outlined earlier to show you how to build a winning STP marketing model for your company.
Identify your target market
To begin with, you need to define your target market, which is a three-step process.
First of all, analyze the total available market. Second, figure out the portion of that total market that you think might be interested in your brand’s offering. Last, calculate the obtainable market, which indicates how many people you can reach.
Now, you’re ready to proceed with customer segmentation.
Segment your audience
As we’ve mentioned earlier, you can segment your audience according to several criteria, the most common of which are demographics, location, psychographics, and behavioral. However, feel free to add any further criteria that might make your customer segmentation even more precise and relevant to your brand and its goals.
After doing your segmentation, you need to build a very detailed profile of every segment you’ve identified. Consider these segments like overarching ideal customer profiles: note down their behaviors, pain points, goals, and more, to get a clear, complete, and accurate picture.
Analyze each segment
With all your target segments now ready, you can move to the next phase: analyzing each group. Compare them against one another, as this will quickly tell you which segment appears to be the most compelling, and this will guide you to the next step of the process: targeting.
Choose your target customers
At this point, you have likely narrowed down your initial list of segments to just two or three that look like they could be the most promising ones. Now, you must reflect on which segment you want to tackle first.
Ideally, a good segment to target is large, growing, and easy to reach across a range of marketing and communication channels.
When choosing your segment, remember to also consider how many competitors you are likely to face if you go down one specific route. Some degree of competition is always to be expected, but an already saturated segment might not be the best choice.
Design and develop your positioning
The final stage of the STP marketing process involves developing your brand positioning. What kind of brand are you compared to your competitors? What values drive your operations? What are your mission and vision, and how do your products or services fit in with them?
Answering questions like these will allow you to understand where your brand stands in its market of reference, how many brands you’ll need to contend with, and what type of marketing content and messaging resonates with that kind of positioning.
Key takeaways
As we have seen in this guide, STP marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your brand’s product or services to potential customers who are truly interested in them and ready to buy.
We have also illustrated some of the most remarkable benefits of STP marketing, such as higher efficiency, greater personalization, and better product development. So, what are you waiting for? Stop wasting your marketing efforts on tactics that don’t work. Follow our tips to build your STP marketing strategy and start reaping the rewards.
