What is STP & How to Use the STP Model?

STP marketing is one of the greatest marketing models used by companies developed across industries. The term STP is an acronym for segmentation, targeting, and positioning. This advertising model is mostly used to tailor strategies focusing on customers, discovering, and optimizing your marketing efforts.

Since the invention of this strategy, it has taken over the airwaves across the business industry. Marketers use it to refine their strategies and get the best from their efforts. A good STP marketing example helps you to apply all the marketing principles and the required marketing mix to generate reliable plans.

Before going into more detail, we need to elaborate further on the STP model and why you need to implement it in your marketing strategy. Let's get started!

What is STP?

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning are strategies by which marketers create marketing segments to attain a particular competitive edge to apply in marketing. The model aids in discovering the optimal target audiences and segments to determine the segments that matter most. It helps the business stakeholders position their brand identity in the required segment to perform better.

The STP model is generated from a total of three different steps. They are segmentation, targeting, and positioning. The ultimate goal of this strategy is to discover all the profitable marketing segments for a given business to increase its profitability of the given business. When you use this strategy to tailor a marketing model, you mainly focus on your target audience.

This is triggered by the strategy mainly focusing on addressing customer needs and addressing them in the best possible way. It works by painting the exact pictures of your customers, allowing you to understand your customers better. Note that getting to understand your target audience is a crucial aspect of digital marketing.

The model helps you to deliver directly to your customers and address their specific needs. As a result, it becomes easier for you to win potential clients in the long run.

Segmentation in the STP Model

In the STP model, segmentation refers to marketers' processes or actions to divide a comprehensive market size. This is done mainly through research or analytics to make the market size easy to dominate and attract potential customers. Marketers stand a better chance provided that they have a better understanding of the market audience.

Why do you need to segment your market? The reason is very precise. It's obvious that you cannot offer your products to everyone. Even though segmenting is key in helping you understand your audience better, it can also restrict you from getting access to other market opportunities. This mostly happens when you dilute your segments too much.

The more you create smaller segments, it becomes difficult for the organization to achieve its marketing goals. However, you can choose to start with a niche segment because it has a lot of potentials and can heavily impact the success of your marketing strategies. Before you get down to segmenting your audience, you need to start by understanding the goals of the business.

The segments you create should be realistic to offer you value. Keep in mind that the segments are meant to serve the business's best interests.

Targeting in the STP Model 

Once you are done with creating segments, you need to evaluate those that perform better than others. The target in this model refers to choosing the segments that work better depending on the business goals. With the target, you must research the business opportunities in every segment.

After evaluating all the segments, choose the one that aligns with the product you are offering. Even though you may be tempted to use multiple segments to achieve success, it's almost impossible. The best thing to do is to pinpoint your choices to ensure that you have the right segment that serves you better.

By targeting a single segment at a time, you can easily establish measurable strategies to help you identify whether the results generated were expected. Since online marketing is steadily growing, it's essential to ensure that you target every segment as quickly as possible.

When you want to pick a particular segment from the options provided, you need to consider various factors to move in the right direction. The top factors you must keep in mind include measurability, accessibility, sustainability, and actionability.

Positioning in the STP Model 

Positioning refers to creating relevant products and marketing strategies that fit a particular market segment. This is also the final and most important step in the STP model. If you don't get to understand how to position your product to the right audience; your marketing strategy cannot succeed.

At this point, you are free to use tools such as a positioning map and understand your USP. By evaluating the problems of your customers and the products you are offering, you should be able to offer a lasting solution. Evaluate the value proposition of your business that is likely to drive a competitive edge against other competitors within the same segment.

By understanding how to position yourself within the segment and advance what you are offering to your target audience, you establish a solid base that can boost your business performance. During the positioning process, you can decide to bring all the other competing brands on board to evaluate your position in the business.

Note that any service provider that can fulfill the segment's needs will cover the lion's market share. Also, the respective companies are likely to generate more revenue than others.

Importance of STP in Digital Marketing

Have you ever wondered why we use STP in marketing? This is a nice aspect that needs urgent attention! With the rise of digital marketing, STP plays a key role in helping marketers identify the best audience and market segments they can target. The exciting fact is that digital marketing enables first experimentation using data.

This mostly happens during segment determination since it helps construct the segments by research or data. In addition, it helps marketers to understand the response of a given segment to the marketing efforts depending on the expectations. It makes the princess easier since it starts with real-life segments before you get to the business setting.

STP makes it easier to create accurate segments that are likely to yield more results than using the manual method. By conducting in-depth research across the market audience, it's much easier to make prudent development decisions moving forward. It also gives room to conduct experiments before diving deep into the process.

When using STP in marketing, you can easily identify market share within the segments you had not previously recognized. This is the best approach to use when you want to enhance accuracy in your strategies and tailor reliable means of diversifying your brand before potential customers.

What makes the STP model better is the fact that you are likely to encounter more opportunities and opportunities as you implement the model. This means that it offers more advantages than expected, helping businesses grow from one level to the next.

Final Verdict! 

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning are great strategies for marketers who want to nail their efforts and capitalize on the available opportunities in the market. The strategy works better whether you are using the digital or traditional approach. It helps you to collect enough data that you can use to nail your efforts to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your moves.

The key thing when using this strategy is to ensure that you choose the right segments. Provided that you have effective segments that address your target audience, you will easily secure a comprehensive market size that will impact your business growth. Developed companies can use STP to help them ensure that they are dealing with the appropriate market audience.