Segmenting your customers for Marketing seems odd and impersonal to hear, but it’s actually the best thing you can do for your business. Clients are awesome to have, but are they the right ones you need? There’s an analogy of fishing and business. It’s something like this…
The more lines you have in the water, the better chance you have of catching something.
Sounds great right? But what about this one?
If you have too many lines in the water, you can get tangled up.
Segmenting your market is sound advice because you can now develop a deeper understanding of your customers. When you are communicating a message, it will be more effective if the recipient of the message finds it relevant.
Not all fish take the same bait if you will. Take a look at something simple like spending patterns, gender, where they live, their age and the socio-economic group. Take a look at all these before you just dive in, ok no more fish or water references.
Let’s look at a few ideas on how to segment.
Social Data
What do they talk about on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? This discovery will show you if you are speaking to them, or to yourself. Take a careful and close look at what brands your customers like and follow. You’ll soon start to get an idea about how to engage them and gain their loyalty as much as they are loyal to the big brands.
Demographic
Gender, location and birthdays are important to note in your demographic. I know, I wrote “birthdays”, but here’s the idea behind this. Facebook is great about reminding you about someones birthday. And it’s around this time a purchase is made for the birthday boy or girl.
By watching whose birthday it is and giving them a shout out or mention on your social page, your inviting them to participate. However, don’t use this as an opportunity to “sell” them on your services, but rather offer a gift card, and like the GodFather maybe later you’ll want a happy birthday nod in return in the form of a positive review.
Benefits
Benefits of segmentation are simply broken down to the following:
- identify your most and least profitable customers
- focus your marketing on the customers who will be most likely to buy your products or services
- avoid the markets which will not be profitable for you
- build loyal relationships with customers by developing and offering them the products and services they want
- improve customer service
- get ahead of the competition in specific parts of the market
- use your resources wisely
- identify new products
- improve products to meet customer needs
- increase profit potential by keeping costs down, and in some areas enabling you to charge a higher price for your products and services
- group your customers by factors such as geographical location, size and type of organization, type and lifestyle of consumers, attitudes and behavior
But why segment your clients?
Because you can manage your customers needs better.
Customer satisfaction is a great goal, but I’ve seen it financially and emotionally bankrupt a company. If customers are not under control as to what is important and by how much they pay you, you’ll end up on a downward spiral to burnout and making promises you cannot possibly keep.
Besides, your individual customers have differing needs, it will be easier to give them what they want if you divide them into groups sharing similar needs, and treat each group differently.
If you like this post, or have a idea about how to segment and how it’s worked for you, please share in the comments below.
