Employee & service marketing & hrm (human resource management) needs market segmentation. Why? Because people differ as employees and as clients just as they do as consumers.

How Does HRM Influence Employee & Service Marketing?

Human resource managers (hrm) recognize differences in people through all management phases. Some people will fit in a particular organization better than other people. Some people will be more motivated by a certain organizational culture, while others will find that same culture inhibiting or demotivating.

Some people love playing office politics and thrive in environments where playing office politics well earns rewards like promotions and raises. Other people hate office politics, refuse to more than passively participate, keep their noses to the grindstone, and never get rewards for their productivity in highly political environments. Thus, they aren’t happy and usually take their productivity and accomplishments to a different organization.

How Does Market Segmentation Improve HRM Employee & Service Marketing?

Market segmentation can help human resource managers assure that only people who will thrive within an organization are hired. Market segmentation can also help to assure that employee’s and clients’ personal goals mesh well with the organization’s.

Thus, employee & service marketing & hrm requires doing the same type of target marketing that business marketers do for consumers.

Employee & Service Marketing & HRM Step 1: Recruiting

So the first step in blending employee & service marketing & hrm is to determine the type of person:

who will thrive in the organizational culture,

whose personal goals align with the organization’s goals, and

whose work habits will make a contribution without attracting negative attention from colleagues.

Market segmentation aids human resource managers to select demographic and psychographic characteristics that will most likely include best employee and client prospects, who will be successful and satisfied within and with the organization.

Employee & Service Marketing & HRM Step 2: Retention

The second step in blending employee & service marketing & hrm is to increase retention. Market segmentation can also help identify those in danger of leaving the organization and determine how to bring them back into the fold, if that is in the organization’s best interest.

Employee & Service Marketing & HRM Step 3: Marketing

The third step in blending employee & service marketing & hrm is to determine how to get happy employees and clients to spread word-of-mouth marketing about the organization. Market segmentation helps by determining what people most value, and assuring that they get their needs met in a way that makes them feel positive about the organization.

There is no better marketing than positive statements made to friends and acquaintances by happy employees and clients. Similarly, there is nothing more damaging to an organization than having unhappy employees and clients making detrimental statements about the organization to others.

Employee & Service Marketing & HRM: Conclusion

Market segmentation aids employee & service marketing & hrm through all three major steps: recruiting employees and clients, keeping them happy, and turning them into marketing agents.

But to do all these successfully requires understanding the relationship of demographic characteristics to personality and behavior characteristics. You can do just that with Human Resource Managers.

To read more specifically about service marketing, go to the post below:

What Is Service Marketing?

You can assure that you never miss one of my posts by subscribing to my RSS feed in the upper right corner. Or you can get my email announcements by completing the form below::

Posted 7-21-08: Employee & Service Marketing & HRM Need Market Segmentation

Bookmark It

Market segmentation and intentional marketing are related because intentional marketing requires target marketing. And target marketing requires market segmentation.

If you are unfamiliar with intentional marketing, it’s just what its name implies. It’s marketing with intention to accomplish specific goals by getting a target market to take specified actions. Thus, the three major elements of intentional marketing are:

Elements of Intentional Marketing: Have A Marketing Plan

The first element requires that you have a marketing plan – that you know what you want to accomplish with your marketing, and you know how you plan to accomplish it.

Elements of Intentional Marketing: Use Market Segmentation

It’s for the second and third elements that market segmentation generates much valuable information. First, market segmentation helps you to identify the people most likely to buy your product or service. They comprise your target market.

Second, market segmentation helps you to relate to your target market members so that your marketing offers will effectively persuade them to take actions that you propose. These actions may or may not include buying a product or service.

Intentional marketing actions may relate to objectives other than actually selling a product.

For example, in the Internet marketing business, building a list is fundamental to success. So list building is an important marketing objective.

Most Internet marketers don’t try to sell you something the first time that you visit their sites. Instead they offer to give you something in return for your name and email address. After you are on a list, smart list owners will build a relationship with you by offering additional helpful information.

So building a relationship is a second important marketing objective. It requires that list owners learn as much as possible about their list members. Some Internet marketers use surveys to gather this information and offer rewards to you for completing the survey.

Others choose a less formal and less reliable method of learning about their list members. Two common examples include encouraging you to provide feedback by replying to messages or by going to their blogs for information and leaving a comment.

Only after they have built a good relationship with you, will the best internet marketers attempt to sell you something which is, of course, their ultimate goal. Internet marketers like all business owners must make a profit or eventually get out of business.

Market segmentation aids relationship building for any type of business. It reveals psychographic, sociographic, and buying behavior characteristics that help you to meet your intentional marketing objectives and ultimate goal.

You can read more about Intentional Marketing through the link in this sentence.

Add to Onlywire

Get Your Free Target Market Report by completing the form below:

Posted 7-14-08: Market Segmentation And Intentional Marketing

Bookmark It

Market segmentation requires that you know the demographics of your target market. In yesterday’s post, I started discussing how Internet marketers can begin getting that information. Today’s post will continue that discussion and provide you basic information on conducting a survey.

Using A Survey To Get Demographics For Market Segmentation

Regardless of how you reach your target market members, you need to have a survey instrument for them to complete. Then after completing the survey, you give them a free product.

If you use an autoresponder like Aweber, which I use, you can do your survey as a form. The disadvantage of doing your survey this way is that most autoresponder services require at least an email in every form.

Many people will not provide you with personal information if they believe there is anyway that you can relate that information to them. So requiring a email address will drastically decrease your responses.

A better idea is to use a survey service like Survey Monkey. You can complete your survey there and send people directly to it. Then Survey Monkey will even analyze the results for you. It’s easy and inexpensive.

Some Survey Basics For Gathering Market Segmentation Demographics

Still you do need to know the basics of survey design, or you may not be able to generalize your results from survey participants to the rest of your target market. But if you are just asking for demographic information and don’t include attitude questions, it pretty easy.

Just make sure that your options don’t overlap. For example, if you’re asking for age, and you have a category of “20 to 30 years old” and the next category is “30 to 40 years old”, the two categories overlap. You can solve this problem by making the second category “31 to 40 years old”.

You also want to assure that your categories include everyone. You can do this by adding an “other” category, but that doesn’t provide you with much information. It’s better to use a final category for age of “61 or older”, and a starting category as “under 21”. This will include everyone.

Get Help With Your Market Segmentation Demographics

If you follow these simple guidelines, you can design your own survey, but if you don’t have time to or don’t want to, I do offer a service to determine your target market’s demographics for you. You can learn more about it by clicking the link above.

Other Market Segmentation And Marketing Services

I also offer other marketing services. You can learn more about them through the following links:

Complete Target Market Profile

Basic Marketing Campaign

Marketing Campaign with Tactics

Whether you do your own research or hire it done, the time and money that you spend on market segmentation will improve your target marketing.

To learn more about Internet marketing, click the link below:

Internet Marketers Need To Know Their Target Markets

Add to Onlywire

Get Your Free Instant Market Analysis by completing the form below:

Posted 6-26-08: Market Segmentation
For Internet Marketers 2

Bookmark It

Market segmentation is used more by off line business owners than by Internet Marketers.

One reason is because Internet marketers often target markets by key words and phrases and don’t know the demographic characteristics of the people who search for those key words.

Internet Marketers Need Demographic Information On Their Target Markets

If you’re an Internet marketer, you probably don’t know enough demographic information about the people using your key words to utilize market segmentation. But if you learn, you can increase your income.

But you can get the demographic information to learn about your target markets. It does require some research and will likely cost you some money. But the results of market segmentation are worth it.

If you’ve already built a good list, it will be easier and cheaper to conduct research and determine you target market’s demographics than if you have to advertise for people to take your survey. So you can relatively easily and inexpensively utilize market segmentation with a list.

How To Get Demographic Information On Your Target Market

To conduct demographic research for the people who use your key words, you first need to have something to offer them in return for providing you with their information. Digital information products work well because they are delivered instantly and incur no delivery expenses.

How To Get Demographic Information Through Pay Per Click

If you don’t have a good list, then you will have to use pay-per-click to get people who search for your key words to click on your advertisement and trade their demographics for your free product.

This can be costly, and it may not reach the same people who click on organic search results for your key words. I recently read research indicating that the people who click on pay-per-click ads are usually younger and less likely to purchase a product than people who click on organic search results. They comprise two different segments so getting information on clickers to use for searchers can distort your market segmentation research.

How To Get Demographic Information Through Forums

You may get less distorted information by joining forums that your target market members are likely to join and post your proposal there.

Whichever, technique you use to get demographic information on your target market, you have to have that information before you can use market segmentation to get personality characteristics and buying behavior.

The next post in this series will guide you to get demographic information with surveys. Then you can use information from the surveys to get even more information on your target market using market segmentation. You can access that post below:

Market Segmentation For Internet Marketers 2

Add to Onlywire

Get Your Free Customized Target Market Report by completing the form below:

Posted 6-25-08: Market Segmentation
For Internet Marketers 1

Bookmark It

Market segmentation has had a strong effect on my professional and academic career. Let me tell you what it has done for me.

I Started In The Wrong Career

I started my career teaching English at a small private college. I hated it and barely made a subsistence income. I became determined to use my skills doing something that I liked and that rewarded me financially.

I Made a Lateral Career Change

When I got the opportunity to start a marketing and public relations program for a small community college, I jumped for it. Now when I say small, I mean small. This college looked like a couple of buildings in the middle of a cow pasture, and it had only a few hundred students.

Now at this point in my career, I’d never heard of market segmentation. But in four years of teaching college students, I’d learned how they thought, what they wanted and how they wanted to get it. Plus, still in my twenties, I wasn’t much older than the students, and the college was just 45 miles from where I grew up so I knew their culture. In short I knew this market.

I developed ads and promotions designed specifically for potential students in that and surrounding towns and delivered those messages through the media they used. My efforts resulted in doubling enrollment and my salary in each of the four years that I worked at the college.

I Learned The Importance Of Knowing My Target Market

That success convinced me of the importance of knowing a market. I still didn’t know the term market segmentation, but I understood the importance of knowing a target market. I also understood the influence of age and background on behavior.

Because I never lucked into another market so much like me, I had to determine ways of learning about other markets. That led to better jobs and greater success until I decided that I wanted to teach young people the career that I had found so rewarding.

I Developed A System To Help My Students

By this time, I did know the term “market segmentation” and I knew the fundamentals of doing basic market segmentation research.

But my students found learning about target markets more challenging, so I developed a systematic process to teach them how, and it worked. They began basing verbal and visual communication decisions on target market characteristics, winning awards for their work, getting the best jobs in the area and competitive jobs nationwide.

And people in the profession began to notice, leading to speaking opportunities for me locally and nationally, my first book, and a national column in a professional journal.

I Took Early Retirement To Teach Others

When I took early retirement in December of 2005 to start my own business, I decided to share my simple market segmentation process with other small business owners. I first updated the market segmentation research from my decade of column articles. I organized them into an e-book that I now call Know ‘em Sell ‘em: How To Discover The Best Appeals For Your Target Market.

Then I decided to automate my market segmentation process to make it even easier for small business owners to use. The result is an automatic target market analysis that is undoubtedly the quickest and easiest process around. And for a limited time, I’m offering a free one-time trial of it.

You Can Access Your Free Trial Market Analysis by completing the form below:

Come back for tomorrow’s post.

Add to Onlywire

Posted 6-23-06: My Market Segmentation Experience

Bookmark It