Everyone in your target market is enthusiastic about your products and services. Nevertheless, people have different characteristics regarding age, gender, interests, spending habits, marital status, income level, and location. You must take into consideration the diversity of characteristics within the target market; otherwise, you risk failing to achieve the intended result. As the saying goes, “your customer isn’t everyone”, so find your niche. Believing that everyone is your customer doesn’t help in the expected way – you’ll spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to reach people who simply aren’t interested. The point is you must be specific rather than vague about who you’re communicating with.
You should be able to create a market segmentation strategy to have as many touch-points as possible using targeted messaging. In this article, we’ll learn how to correctly identify a segmentation strategy that works for your team.
1. Find The People Who Need Your Products/Services
Identify the primary need for your products or services. In other words, determine what kind of audience there is, even if it’s a time-consuming and arduous product. Determine who your ideal customer is and be as specific as possible. Instead of taking a wild guess, look at your current customer base, as this will give you an overview of “who is who”. All of your customers have some sort of problem that your products or services can solve, but within that group, there are different market segments, so take into account sorting them into categories. Remember that today’s consumers are bombarded with information and options, so they struggle to find what they need.
2. Gather Data About Your Audience
Amass as much information as you can about likely customers by performing market research. In fact, it’s recommended to hire a market research company to save money and time for your business. There are segmentation services available, and they’re increasing by the day. A B2B and B2C market research company like Savanta USA may use email newsletters, chatbots, social media, interviews, and so on to create a database of information about your customers, which you can use to identify trends. The information can be invaluable because it helps your business identify target resources and messaging for specific groups of consumers. You can create offerings for different segments like high-income vs. low-income or men vs. women.
3. Identify Underserved Markets
The discovery of an underserved market helps customers get access to much-needed products and services, yet it can also be a lucrative opportunity for your business. Do your best to find new opportunities by focusing on the customers your industry has overlooked. Reach out to individuals and ask relevant pain questions about what problems they’ve experienced and what they’d like to see change. Even if their answers take you by surprise, they’ll be useful in helping you develop a business plan. Diving the target market into different segments based on certain criteria will allow you to find new uses for your current products and services.
4. Find Out More About People’s Attitudes, Behaviors, And Habits
Messaging should speak directly to specific audiences, but in order to be effective, you must understand the attitudes, behaviors, and habits of those people. Armed with formative research, you can create detailed buyer personas. Take the time to learn how disparate market segments make purchasing decisions and lifestyle considerations to figure out how to appeal to those actions. While understanding audience behavior is essential, it’s equally important to understand their feelings and emotions. Individuals who connect emotionally to a brand are more valuable than satisfied customers. Obtain information about how every target group learns about your products or services, views your advertising, and interacts with one another.
5. Create Detailed Buyer Personas
Detailed buyer personas help ensure activities related to acquiring and serving customers are tailored to their needs. Even if you’re able to identify and profile the audience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can make a profit from the relationship. Buyer personas matter for businesses with multiple employees, but even if you’re a small business (or a solopreneur), you should still bother. You can use the information to review your demographic analysis, the study of behavior, interests, and so forth. There’s no wrong or right way to create a buyer persona, but it’s best to be specific. The more precise you are, the more real the person becomes.
6. Review Your Profit Potential
The profit potential isn’t a definite guarantee of earnings but rather an indicator of the estimated return on the investment. You’ll want to be sure you can make a considerable profit from working with different categories of consumers, so focus your attention on the most profitable groups. The profit side of the equation is easy to calculate: create a reasonable estimate of public demand and multiply it by the projected sale price. Take into account how much money each segment spends and think about how you can capture profit from new segments to increase your income. If the earnings are higher, the profit potential is a more lucrative offer for investors.
7. Name Your Segments & Test Your Appeal
Consumers are very different from one another, so you can classify them by saying one is alpha and the other omega (it’s just an example). More exactly, come up with a short phrase that sums up the identity of each segment to distinguish one group from another in conversation. You can postpone naming audience segments until you have a thorough understanding of the differentiators and the descriptive/profiling characteristics. Above all, test your appeal with each target group by gathering customer data in a way that’s transparent and direct and monitoring key indicators that measure engagement. How else are you going to win the race of running a profitable company?
Conclusion
All in all, audience/market segmentation helps you target the most likely customers, meaning your techniques will be aimed at their demands, tastes, and behaviors. As you move forward, the market will change, and the audience will evolve, so update your strategy on a regular basis to make sure you’re speaking to the right people – individuals who need your products or services.
