Segmentation, Targeting, & Positioning (STP Marketing): The Marketer’s Guide

As a content strategist, I like to ask my clients a lot of questions, starting with, “Who’s your target audience?”

But do you know what answer I always dread hearing? “Everyone”

While it’s nice to believe that everyone would be interested in purchasing your product or service, this definition (or lack thereof) creates way more work for you and also does a disservice to your actual target market. This is where segmentation, targeting, and positioning come into play.

We developed this guide to help you understand how and why you should invest time into STP for better, more effective marketing. Let’s dive in.

At its core, STP marketing helps you to better target your marketing messages and better serve your customer base.

Here’s an example: I once created a marketing strategy for a fitness apparel brand. Rather than appeal to all fitness enthusiasts across the board, the brand wanted to target a specific segment within their target market: female yoga fans in their 30s and 40s. 

Ultimately, our marketing campaign was much more efficient and cost-effective since we knew our audience, where to reach them, and what messages would resonate.

Conducting an STP Marketing Analysis

STP allows you to take a large, anonymous audience and define how your different products (or different components of the same product) relate to specific consumer segments within that larger audience — thus understanding how to position your product(s) and messaging to grab the attention of each segment.

Let’s unpack each part of the segmentation-targeting-positioning model.

1. Segmentation

Segmentation refers to…