Target marketing and direct mail: a smart campaign combination

Camping Magazine, Nov-Dec, 1994 by Mark J. Brostoff

There are three basic steps to a successful camp marketing campaign: Define what your camp has to offer. Determine who needs or wants your camp's product or service. Get the message to that audience that you have what they need or want.

For a camp director, identifying your camp's product or service means defining what you have to offer in terms of your current and prospective clients' needs or wants. For example, a summer camp experience is not only labeled recreation. It could be classified as education, special populations, day camp, skill development, socialization, and many others.

Using a strategy called market segmentation will help you to identify and classify your camp's product or service. It is a process of determining the wants and needs of the market for the purpose of allocating marketing resources. Once segments have been defined, target markets can be specified.

Segmenting Consumer Markets

The four most common bases of market segmentation are:

Geographic -- This is the simplest method of segmenting the consumer market, identifying market segments according to geography (such as region, city size, market density, and climate). Since market potential is often measured in terms of population, it is relevant for camp marketers to analyze markets by population concentration and growth rates.

Demographic -- This is perhaps the most widely used method, identifying market segments by a set of quantifiable characteristics (such as age, income, and family size).

Psychographic -- This method divides the market according to the psychological characteristics of buyers. Obviously, consumers' purchases are strongly influenced by their activities, lifestyles, interests, and opinions.

Behavioralistic -- This method cuts across geographic and demographic segments and life-style characteristics, identifying the product or service benefit expectations. It is a useful technique, particularly when the marketer has reason to believe that the benefit sought is more relevant to the decision to purchase than other factors.

Defining the Target Market

Many methods of segmentation are not useful to the camp marketer because the variables do not provide marketing guidance. The key is to target a segment that is both meaningful and reachable. (It does little good to identify a segment that is difficult to reach through promotional efforts.)

Figure 1 illustrates the concept of a single marketing mix concentrating on a specific segment or subset of an entire market. This segment is considered the target market.

Every facet of a marketing activity needs to be precisely tailored toward satisfying the target market. A camp's product, price, distribution, and promotional strategies (single marketing mix) should focus on a single goal: to encourage the target market to invest its resources in the camp's product or service. To do this, your marketing efforts must convince the target market that the camp's product or service can satisfy its needs better than any other alternative.

Direct marketing is the total of activities by which products and services are offered to market segments, in one or more media, for informational purposes or to solicit a direct response from a present or prospective customer or contributor by mail, telephone, or other access.

Direct mail, one of the oldest advertising media, consists of advertising mailed directly to the target market. The average household receives 2.5 direct mail pieces each day, and 65% of all third-class mail is opened and read by some member of the household.

Direct Mail gets your message to your audience.

There is a growing interest in direct mail because it provides the greatest efficiency in reaching a target market. While direct mail can be a very high cost-per-thousand medium, it has the least amount of waste exposure. Unlike the audiences of the mass media, the names on a carefully selected mailing list should all be interested in the marketer's offering. You should use direct mail for three other reasons:

Direct mail is measurable. One of the most appealing dimensions of direct mail is that the advertiser can calculate the return of the advertising investment. The purpose of direct mail is to stimulate a short-term response from the target audience; therefore, the marketer is able to determine the profitability of the effort.

Direct mail works. The response rate may not necessarily be high, but direct mail is a medium that motivates people to act.

Direct mail is a flexible medium. It can be used by a wide range of camps from special populations and day camps with small target markets to resident camps with large national markets.

Direct mail also allows you to create an advertising piece that is perfectly suited to the creative needs of the product or service. With direct mail, there simply are no limits on time or space. Each mailing package is designed to take the reader through the entire sales process, from introduction of the product (letter), to complete explanation of benefits (brochure), to providing a mechanism for further inquiry and/or ordering (order form, return envelope). Direct mail packages vary widely, with each of these elements modified to suit your need and to maximize response and profitability. Creativity within these pieces depends on the following factors: