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.

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Posted 6-23-06: My Market Segmentation Experience

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 6:26 am and is filed under Market Segmentation.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.