Micromarketing

Publication Date :

02 Dec, 2022

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Table Of Contents

What Is Micromarketing?

Micromarketing refers to a marketing strategy adopted by a business to target a specific audience by collecting the audience's consumption habits. As a result, a company can easily design and implement marketing strategies for a niche audience to market its product or services.

It tends to be cost-effective and gives higher returns on investment for the companies in their marketing efforts. In addition, it helps a company build a personal relationship with the customer and their needs, which translates into a loyal customer base with time. Marketers base their ad campaigns on demographics such as profession, gender, place, age group, and social interests.

What is Micromarketing?

Micromarketing means creating a highly targeted and niche audience of a particular profession, age, gender, or place to make their products reach them via advertisements easily.
It helps companies to have a loyal customer base that helps in business growth and building brand through appropriately designed ad campaigns and marketing tools.
Being cost-effective has been its forte, whereas its nature of consuming a lot of time and research has been its greatest disadvantage.
Building of stable and loyal customer base has been the feature of micromarketing, whereas being costly and ineffective has been the feature of Macromarketing.

Micromarketing Explained

Micromarketing refers to a tool of selecting a narrow audience to target them as per their unique needs to market one's product so that maximum effect and return on investment are realized. Due to customization and a lack of economies of scale, it may be more expensive than other marketing strategies. However, for firms working in a cutthroat market, marketing is essential. Companies utilize marketing to grow their customer base, sales, brand recognition, and profits.

Any company's long-term viability hinges on how well its marketing effort performs. No matter how many products a firm sells, it must determine its target market to launch a successful marketing effort. In the past, businesses broadcast radio or TV advertisements as part of their mass marketing efforts to draw in target market consumers. Instead of addressing a large audience at once, firms can now deliver more tailored marketing strategies to each person in their target group.

Social media advent has added to and strategized micromarketing to newer heights. First, companies employ social media marketing agencies to look into the likes & dislikes of consumers. After this, they segregate the audience into various categories required by the product.

As a result, they design marketing campaigns to cater to the needs of the various target audiences. Then they run those ad campaigns across the social media platform. The campaigns get customized per the customers' needs and preferences, audience location, festive season, region, or city of the demographics. Although it may sound cost-effective initially, after the end of the marketing period, it turns out to have higher spending per customer.

Micromarketing Levels

The four levels of micromarketing that companies use are the following:

Segments – Every market gets broken down into segments requiring different data and marketing methods. For example, a global segment fits a global audience.
Niches – These consumers have similar product preferences and act as a group.
Local areas – It helps specify the type of marketing marketers can use and know the segment that uses the entire product.
Individuals – It relates to individuals' habits. Marketers collect information from individuals to understand the segment considered for marketing.

Furthermore, it becomes difficult to scale the marketing to cut costs. Moreover, if the marketing fails, then the reputation of the company gets hampered as well. In a way, micromarketing has been a two-edged sword to be used carefully; otherwise, it may be more harmful than beneficial.

Examples

Let us look at some micromarketing examples to make the topic clearer.

Example #1

A sports betting company has employed a micromarketing technique to draw users to its betting platform. To establish a free-to-play game that offers mock-in-play bets for the 2020 National Football league, it just reached a product deal with FanDuel Group.

The partnership deal would enable Simplebet to target FanDuel's free games users interested in placing real money wagers. In this manner, it would gain from a massive influx of customers onto its betting platform and generate actual income from them.

Example #2

365 Retail Markets ("365"), a leading provider of self-service commercial technology in the food service domain, has set its eyes on acquiring Sentry. Sentry works in the micro-market management domain and also as a vending machine. Sentry has an inbuilt capacity to turn a huge point of sale (POS) fleet into useful information to target more than two thousand operators globally.

Therefore, 365 Retail Markets can narrow its audience to various operator categories and market its self-service commercial technology related to food service.

Advantages & Disadvantages

Every marketing technique has both benefits as well as losses to a company, as discussed in the table below:

Micromarketing Advantages	Micromarketing Disadvantages
It comes out as the most cost-effective marketing tool for companies.	It has been a time-consuming tool to conduct research about the targeted audience and develop products and ad campaigns accordingly.
Every type of business can use it without any problem.	Due to its highly targeted nature, the company may only be stereotyped as one product.
It helps companies to know every detail about customers that helps them customize products as per consumer needs.	If the micromarketing or product fails, it poses a considerable risk to the company's brand image.
The targeted audience provides detailed feedback on the products of the company.	A smaller audience means a smaller customer base that may saturate over time.
Since marketing considers the demographics' needs, it helps build customer loyalty toward the company.	It may also lead to a higher cost per acquisition of new customers.
Companies can quickly sell their products to their loyal customers and profit.	The chances of missing the target audience or the demographics tend to be higher.

Micromarketing vs Macromarketing

Marketing has been essential for companies to promote their product, win customer base, and generate profit. However, micro & macro marketing techniques differ in their approach, as listed in the below table.

Micromarketing	Macromarketing
Micromarketing targets a small group of people based on their demographics like age, gender, likes, profession, and location.	Macro-marketing aims to reach the common masses irrespective of age, gender, likes, profession, and location.
It has a narrow set of traits that cater to one section of society.	The audience is quite vast and widespread to cater to everyone.
Mass preference or movement does not affect the micro marketing environment.	Mass movement or trend affects the marketing environment and manipulates it also.
It has been a cost-effective and cheaper mode of marketing.	Its cost has been relatively high compared to other marketing tools.
Feedback has been a pretty crucial and effective means of marketing.	Feedbacks from the audience usually remain ineffective.
It successfully builds a strong relationship with customers.	It does not aim to build any relationship with customers.
This marketing successfully builds a loyal customer base that translates into profits and a new customer base.	Macro-marketing needs to attract and build a loyal customer base.
It can get deemed as a local form of marketing.	It can get seen as a global form of marketing.
For every audience category and geographical location, a different micromarketing strategy must be built within a country or continent.	Only one generic form of marketing campaign can be used within a nation and continent.
It has got criticized for being too time-consuming and for a market research-based approach.	Marketing does not take much time, and market research is unnecessary.
The whole product range and the company may be negatively affected if it fails.	It is not the case here.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What ethical issues are associated with micromarketing?

The biggest issue associated with Micro-marketing has been the breach of privacy of customers by companies and marketers collecting data from social media websites. Another issue has been the manipulation of customers' preferences in buying their products.

What are the two types of micromarketing?

There have been two types of Micro-marketing – location-based and relationship-based approaches.

Why do companies use micromarketing?

Micromarketing has been a highly targeted way of marketing. It saves cost by narrowing the target audience to a small section of the population that requires a micro-budget and small expenses compared to other means.

How is macro marketing different from micromarketing?

Macromarketing and Micro-marketing differ, mainly based on the target audience and required cost. The former requires a narrow target audience and micro-budget, whereas the latter requires a general audience and large budgets for their execution.