Get Yourself More Customers Using Market Segmentation

Once you have started running your business, you will understand that everyone is not the right fit for your business. Your product may be a mass one or a niche one, but it can never cater to everybody in the world. As a prudent business measure, it is important to direct all your marketing and advertising effort towards only those people who are potential buyers, as any expense made towards the rest is just unnecessary. How do you understand whom to spend on? The first step is to identify who you want to sell to, that is, your target customers.

Market segmentation is a great way to identify your target customers. The key to using market segmentation to correctly identify your target customer base lies in a few easy steps. Read on to find out what they are.

Refine the product: As discussed, you are not trying to sell your product to everyone or have it do everything. Understand whether your product fits in to the category of basic needs, solution to a particular problem or feel-good. You have to market it accordingly. Your product or service may fit more than one category, too

Identify the target market: Now that you have identified what purpose your product serves, you need to identify whom to sell it to. Are they located in your own region or community, within your country or internationally? You may have multiple markets. In any case, determine the demographics of the target customer base and group them as per

§  Age: children, teens, young, middle, elderly

§  Gender: male, female

§  Education: high school, college, university

§  Income: low, medium, high

§  Marital status: single, married, divorced

§  Ethnic and/or religious background

§  Family life cycle: newly married, married for 10 – 20 years, with or without children.

Other factors as per which you need to group them, are:                       

§  Income and lifestyle

§  Social class: lower, middle, upper

§  Opinion: easily led or opinionated

§  Activities and interests

§  Attitudes and beliefs

Describe Your Ideal Customer: After the above 2 steps, you must be forming an idea of the person you are trying to sell to. Where he lives, what he uses your products for, his age and income group, lifestyle etc. Write down this description clearly and identify the number of people who fall into this category. They are your target crowd. They may be new to your product or already using a competitor’s products.

Extend and Re-target: Now it is your job to come up with a solid marketing strategy for this specific market and introduce them to your brand and your product. You can reach them online through social media advertising, or offline through traditional marketing methods. You may even extend the category by age or income to broaden the reach if you see the scope.

Now you are ready to go for the kill. Remember, there is a market for everything. You just need to find yours correctly.