What is the definition of a vertical marketing strategy?
A vertical marketing approach focuses your content production and distribution efforts on your company’s best-fit kind of consumers, attracting them into your marketing-sales funnel and converting them into customers.
Vertical marketing methods target a qualified specialised audience rather than broadening your plan via horizontal marketing.
But what exactly is a vertical?
Industry is a wide sector that includes things like healthcare, software, retail, and hotels. Verticals provide another degree of detail to the industry category, indicating more about what firms do, who they serve, and how mature they are. (Vertical markets and ideal client profiles might be quite similar.) One vertical you may target inside the software business, for example, is enterprise martech.
Refining your description of the kind of businesses for whom you want to address pain points will help you zero in on those verticals. You may have a solution that is relevant to every firm in a particular sector, but the vertical you’re targeting is the one with the least need for it and so the simplest to sell to.
If an accounting software company employed a horizontal marketing approach, its target customer may be in-house accountants. They might, however, utilise a vertical marketing approach to target accountants at mid-size manufacturing businesses in the United States since their software has particular capabilities that aid in the financial parts of manufacturing supply chains.
How to Find Target Verticals
Defining the criteria for the verticals to target necessitates research into your client base and entire addressable market.
If you already have a client base, you may narrow down which verticals to target by examining your customer data.
- What sorts of businesses do you sell to?
- What do they have in common in terms of industry, revenue, and firm size?
- Which of these firms is the easiest to sell to?
- Which of these firms is the easiest to service?
However, if your organisation is younger, you may not be able to develop that definition by studying people you’re presently assisting since you may not have enough historical data. Instead, you’ll need to do market research to determine who has the difficulties that your solution answers.
This research should not only assist you in defining the verticals you want to target, but it should also give you the knowledge you need to generate and deliver content to them successfully.
- What are the themes they’re looking for?
- What type of message will they respond to?
- What networks are they watching?
- What content forms do they prefer?
Key Takeaways
There will always be certain constraints to the resources you can commit to marketing and sales, no matter how large or little your company is. A vertical marketing plan may assist you in prioritising where to spend your efforts for the most effect.
Furthermore, by focusing your marketing approach on a particular vertical, you may have a deeper knowledge of the requirements of those organisations, allowing you to generate content that will connect with them more successfully.
