Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment: Access and Action

If you are following my posts on criteria necessary for a market segment, this is the second one. It relates to:

assuring that you can reach the market segment and
that the people in it will take your desired actions.

You can reach the market segment:

• through media that its members use,
• with appeals and language that are specifically appropriate for them,
• for a product or service that they need or want.

Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment: Get Access By Knowing Their Media

Market segmentation will reveal the best media to use for your selected market segment.

For example, the World War II generation can be reached through the mass media with traditional advertising and news releases. However, if you want to reach Generation Y members, you need to use word-of-mouth advertising, such as posting on Internet sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment: Reach Them By Using Their Language

You also need to use the language that people in the market segment use.

For example, as a baby boomer, I think more linearly than Generation X and Y members. So my writing doesn’t communicate effectively with the latter generations. Futhermore, as a former professor, I write more objectively and less personably than even many Boomers.

My Generation X assistant is always telling me that I need to write more personably. I’m working on it because I know I have to communicate in the language that my target market uses.

You also have to learn the communication styles and language use of your selected market segment. If you don’t know where to begin, go to forums and other community sites and copy some of what the people in the market segment write. Then try to adapt that to your own writing.

Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment: Get Them To Take Action

Your knowledge about the market segment should be detailed enough to provide you with effective actions or tactics to produce an effective marketing campaign.

It doesn’t do you any good to reach a market segment that won’t take the actions that you need them to take. Thus no marketing is going to help your business if you are marketing to people who will never buy your product or take the other actions that you desire and need to keep your business afloat.

What Marketing Does For Your Business

I recently read a post from another marketer. Sorry I don’t remember the site or the author. It’s an absent-minded professor thing. But the content in the post has stayed with me.

The author was discussing a new definition of marketing recently adopted by the American Marketing Association. He noted that the definition specified a business’s obligation to customers, but failed to include that a business has to get something back for what it provides. Otherwise, the business fails.

If you can’t get people in a market segment to buy your products or services, you need to target a different one.

So market segments must be accessible and actionable. That’s the fourth of five criteria necessary for a market segment. To learn about the fifth criteria click on the link below:

Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment: Profit Potential

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