Market segmentation can help you, as a small business owner to identify your target market and discover the best appeals for marketing.

The Biggest Mistake Small Business Owners Make In Their Marketing

Most small business owners need help with everything marketing - from choosing a name and logo as a brand for their business, to marketing ideas, to what is and isn’t ethical marketing. Yet, the biggest marketing problem that I see small business owners making is thinking that everybody is a potential customer.

If that’s what you think, then you’re definitely wasting your marketing resources. Until you know who is most likely to buy your products or services and know how to appeal to this target market, your marketing will be madness. Are you ready to quit just throwing money at marketing and start getting a good return on your marketing investment?

How Market Segmentation Can Help Small Business Owners

Market segmentation enables you to identify and learn your target market.
Market segmentation makes marketing easier and less expensive.
Market segmentation clarifies ethical issues.

Market Segmentation Enables You To Identify And Learn Your Target Market

Market segmentation enables you to identify your target market and learn its members’ concerns, values, fears, hopes and needs. Then you can create marketing messages and activities that will appeal to them. Market segmentation also enables you to discover the type of media they use, the type of people who influence them, and the type of information they need and want. This information helps you to reach your target market members with your marketing.

Market Segmentation Clarifies Ethical Issues

When you use market segmentation, marketing ethics will no longer be a concern because you will know how to meet your potential customer’s needs rather than just your own need to sell. The best marketing is built on a reciprocal relationship. Your customers pay you to give them what they want and need. As long a both you and your customers in this reciprocal relationship get what you want, its ethical.

So how do you change marketing madness to marketing that’s ethical, inexpensive, and effective? With market segmentation.

What is Market Segmentation?

Never heard of market segmentation. Don’t worry. It’s a term used mostly within the marketing community, and many who use the term describe the process with technical terms in a complicated way. Market segmentation is actually just a way of separating your target market from the market at large so you can cater your marketing to the people most likely to buy what you sell.

Marketing agencies and consultants intentionally make market segmentation research seem much more difficult than it is. They want you to think that it requires specialized skills, statistical abilities, and special software that you don’t have. Hmm. Do you think they have a vested interest in making it sound so complicated?

It really isn’t complicated, and it doesn’t necessarily require specialized skills, statistical abilities, and special software. I know because I’ve been doing segmentation research for almost 15 years and wrote a continuous, national column on the topic for a decade.

Market Segmentation Blog

I will be writing this blog based on that experience and my continual research on market segmentation. If you want to learn more about market segmentation, subscribe to my RSS feed.

My next blog will provide definitions of many market segmentation terms. You can access it through the prior link.

You can also read more about who needs market segmentation, why, and how to use it here.

You can get a free trial on my automatic market segmentation program by completing the form below:

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Posted 2-25-08: Market Segmentation:
Why Small Business Owners Need It

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Market segmentation can help small business owners to understand their elusive markets, to get answers to questions about their target markets, and to market more effectively?

If you’re a small business owner needing to improve your marketing, then you’re in the right place.

This blog emphasizes a market research process called market segmentation.

Through this blog, I hope to help you understand how you can improve your marketing and your business by discovering more about groups of people who are important to your business’ success. I believe the best way to do this is through market segmentation.

The Purpose Of Market Segmentation

The purpose of market segmentation is to enable you to target a subgroup of a larger group. In the case of marketing, I call this subgroup a target market. You may use the term target audience, target customers, or target publics.

No matter what you call the group of people from which you select the subgroup, market segmentation enables you to discover how they differ from everyone else. This information enables you to target the subgroup with appeals that are relevant and specific to the people in it. Such targeting is vital if you want to improve your marketing and your relationships with target market members.

My Own Market Segmentation Template and Process

I’ll mention my own matrix market segmentation process a lot on this blog. I invented it while a professor to help my students better understand different groups of people so they could better communicate and relate to people unlike themselves.

It’s a simple process that requires no statistics, technical ability or special software. It synthesizes hundreds of research articles into simple tables that I call matrices. Using it is as simple as pulling rows from different matrices that represent the people whom you want to learn more about. Then you copy and paste each relevant row into your own target market matrix and look for shared characteristics across the rows.

Characteristics repeated most across the most rows will provide the best appeals for your target market. Market segmentation is quick and easy using my matrices.

My Matrix Market Segmentation report provides a market segmentation template, using United States Internet users as the market and provides a step-by-step guide for using my process.

This process can be adapted to any nation by substituting accurate characteristics for each demographic segment for each nation.

Click to read more about market segmentation and why small business owners need it.

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Posted 2-14-08: Market Segmentation Template

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