Market Segmentation and Why Small Business Owners Need It

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

Here’s how market segmentation can help:

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 Makes Marketing Easier And Less Expensive.
Once you have identified and defined your target market, your chances of selling your product or service will greatly increase. Market segmentation makes where and how to market and advertise what you sell self-evident. Marketing ideas will present themselves out of your knowledge of your target market. When you use market segmentation, your marketing will be less expensive, and you won’t need an expensive marketing agency or consultant.

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.

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 get a free report on my matrix market segmentation process by completing the form below:

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