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How to Use Market Segmentation in Target Marketing.

2017-06-11 | 9815 Print PDF

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How to Use Market Segmentation, Target Marketing and Positioning (STP).

It has been ages have actually written something on my blog, have been very busy on a new interesting project actually. But while in my project cognitive state, I was contacted by a client who actually have some serious set backs with his business.

I will try to make this a broad case and will love you to relate with it, so for fun I will attribute this business to one that offers services, the business services are such that they can actually be considered as separate businesses themselves. it's like having several departments under a faculty, or a jack of all trade kind of motto, get it? Good.

image by Universidad de Ibague

After analyzing the business site and I found out the kind of service they offer, my first suggestion was for them to actually undergo a STP process, meaning Segmentation, Targeting and positioning to now define a sound marketing strategy or approach for each service they offer.

Let's kick off with segmentation aspect, with the use of market segmentation, you can pair up niches within the right categories, analyze markets based on profiled customers, deliver more focused and effective marketing strategy.

Market Segmentation is defined by wikipedia as the process of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers (known as segments) based on some type of shared characteristics.

 

Most common types of Market Segmentation includes: 

• Geographic segmentation.
• Demographic segmentation.
• Psychographic segmentation.
• Behavioral segmentation.
• Other types of consumer segmentation.
• Criteria for evaluating segment attractiveness.
• A-priori segmentation...and so much more all based on what you want your segmentation data be based on.

 

But I personally see segementation as a way to stereotype a market via data collaboration and classifying them into types, groups, using variables etc to easily differentiate the market and using these variables as essential guidelines to deliver an outstanding strategic marketing process.

Now my own special tool for data collection is SURVEY MARKETING some marketers have a short sight perspective that this tool lacks detailed insight but forget that the effectiveness of an online survey tool is limited by your imagination. For instance do you know that Market Survey can be used as a sales forecasting tool?

So for my client business, I decided to actually build him an online survey landing page, whose purpose is to help him segment his target audience to the services that is most pertinent to them, by asking concise questions that are both informative and data driven for my client to easily make authoritative decisions on how to build his target market.

Target Market is another interesting part of the STP marketing strategy. It involves breaking a market into segments, in our case our clients business into services, and then concentrating your marketing efforts on one or a few key segments consisting of the customers whose needs and desires most closely match your product or service offerings. It can be used to get potential prospects for your business and increasing your sales(which is our own main goal using this marketing strategy).

The unique merit about target marketing is that by aiming your marketing efforts at specific groups of consumers it makes the promotion, pricing, and distribution of your products and/or services easier and more cost-effective. A very good example will be your Facebook Ads, they always require you select a target audience from segments of Geography, Location, Age, Preferences and to choose Mobile or Desktop or both.

All these are aim to get a better turnover result with your ads, so see target marketing as a way to increase your business success rates, while segementation is just to classify or filter those business opportunities into groups. One criteria I do find highly important is that for both segmentation and target marketing to work I do need a handful of data and my sources for these data needs to be credible.

The essence for this is to help me position my client services and easily visualize market gap in the services he renders, this market gap are basically the goal from the information gathered that will allow his business to take a lead in that niche area.

First thing first I needed to create an online marketing campaign for this, and source out targeted traffic to the survey landing page via optimized keywords on Google Paid per click ads for as many keywords that are related to consumer or buyer keywords for my client business.

Next is to pull off a viral video marketing on Facebook that builds more awareness for the campaign and spread our survey landing page url for others to visit.

Results for this marketing approach to help my client get more sales will be shared on this page when the project has been executed, so please do stay tuned. You can also adopt similar tactics to your marketing strategy if you have a highly competitive and difficult niche.

Conclusion

These are basically the ideal way to approach a business that offer a lot of broad services/products or need to define their target market, you can use the STP Model in marketing, to analyze and define your product/service, price and how you communicate its benefits, to help position it more efficiently in the market.

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