Navigating The Marketplace: Growth Strategies For Your Business was written by business owners rather than professional marketers. But their understanding of using market segmentation to start and grow a business blew me away.

Although market segmentation isn’t a part of the title, this book deserves to be reviewed here because authors Wayne Lovern and Anna Lovern built their growth strategies around selecting the best customer segment for a business and developing a competitive strategy around the customer segment.

In other words, they implement market segmentation from a business owner’s perspective. Then they provide example after example of other business owners who built successful businesses using customer segmentation.

Navigating The Marketplace Matches Customer Segments to Competitive Strategies

The type of customer segmentation that the Lovern’s used was new to me, but really makes good business sense. In fact I liked it so much that I’m planning to concentrate my next post on it.

Briefly the three types of customers they use are prudent shoppers, selective shoppers and bargain hunters.

They match these three types of customers with five competitive strategies:

• Low-cost competitive strategy,
• Enhancement competitive strategy,
• Speed enhancement competitive strategy,
• Flexibility enhancement competitive strategy, and
• Reduction competitive strategy.

They then provide a short list of key success factors for each competitive strategy and distinguish these success factors from support factors. They note that continuously improving key success factors can determine the success or failure of a small business. But trying to continuously improve support factors can just waste resources.

Navigating The Marketplace Helps New And Established Businesses

The first nine chapters of Navigating The Marketplace go into detail about each competitive strategy. These chapters provide a great foundation for new businesses or businesses that need a new start.

The remaining 7 chapters cover growth strategies for stable businesses, whose owners want them to grow or become more profitable. And chapter 16 ends the book with “How to Choose the Best Growth Opportunities.”

I found Navigating The Marketplace to be well written, easy to understand, and quite insightful. I particularly liked the many examples from the authors’ personal experiences and business relationships.

I highly recommend it. You can get it directly through Amazon. And if you want to tip me for this review, click the book image at the top of the page. You’ll still pay the same for the book at Amazon, but I’ll get a small affiliate fee for sending you.

You can read more concerning Navigating The Marketplace by clicking below:

Organize Sales Prospects, Potential Customers Into 3 Types

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Posted 10-24-08: Navigating The Marketplace Review

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If you’re an Internet marketer, you need to know your target market. But this can be especially difficult for Internet marketers.Market segmentation can give you vital information about your target market.

Trying to market on the Internet without knowing who your target market members are, is like shooting blindfolded with a bouncing target.

Unfortunately, many Internet marketers depend totally on keywords without trying to discover anything about the people who use those keywords.

I call that marketing madness because it just throws time and money at marketing with little return on investment.

What Do You Know About Your Target Market?

The easiest way to work with a target market is to target a market like yourself. You already know how you react, and many of those reactions can be generalized to others like you.

The problem comes when your target market is not like you. This is often the case today if you, like many Internet marketers, select a niche based on the number of searches for a keyword and the number of competing sites.

How do you know how target market member’s in these niches will react?
How do you know the best appeals to reach them?
How do you know how to focus your Web site or blog to appeal to them?

You must conduct research.

What Type of Market Research Do You Do?

As an Internet marketer if you want to succeed online, good market research is vital.

Keyword research, monitoring forums and groups, and talking to people are important first steps, but are not enough. Once you’ve learned demographics from these types of research, you can use those demographics to discover much more about your target market, by using market segmentation.

Market segmentation provides a way of using demographic information to determine psychographic, sociographic and behavioral characteristics that enable you to discover the best appeals for your target market.

You can read about the role of gender in internet marketing.

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Posted 7-28-08: Internet Marketers Need To Know Their Target Markets

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Market segmentation spreads through marketing venue after venue. Now it’s making strides in e-mail marketing.

Earlier this week, I read an article in the July 2008 issue of Internet Retailer. The article focused on the future of e-mail marketing and concluded that the bet way to survive low response rates and high unsubscribe rates of e-mail lists is to use market segmentation.

Below are a few of quotes from the article:

“To combat these problems, e-mail marketing experts and vendors point to the need for greater segmentation of e-mail lists to target distinct groups of customers with messages they’re more likely to want and reduce the number of e-mails sent to customers.” Scott Olrich , chief marketing officer at Responsys, Inc.

“… the effectiveness of broadly written and sent e-mails has weakened. … This is where segmentation comes into play, where you can target groups of people more relevantly, like with a subject line that speaks to them. … This requires lots and lots of testing, and thinking very specifically for different customer groups.

“Showing different customers different subject lines, images, products or calls to action can make e-mail messages more applicable and thus more effective.” Julie M. Katz, e-mail marketing analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

These two top-notch marketing experts recognize the value of market segmentation and using it in e-mail marketing. Yet I’ve found that many of the emails I receive are totally ineffective.

Do Your E-mails Use Your List Members’ Language?

Do you get e-mails that are broadcast to 1000s of people on an Internet or retail marketers list? I surely do. Yet, I often find that they don’t speak to me at all. Part of that is surely because I’m a Boomer while most Internet business people are in Generation X. But the e-mails would be far more effective for me if the marketers used market segmentation to separate their lists by generation.

I know that requires gathering some information from list members, but I agree with the marketing experts quoted above, that the effort would pay off with a better return on e-mail marketing investment.

Do You Separate Your List By Their Actions?

Another part of the reason that many e-mails don’t speak to me is that the marketers don’t bother to do even basic list separation. I was on one Internet marketer’s list because I opted in for some freebie. I almost immediately bought one of his e-books. Yet I continued to get e-mails marketing that e-book. I eventually unsubscribed from his list and haven’t bought anything from him since.

If you want to avoid turning off your list members, you need to start using at least basic market segmentation like list separation. If you really want to be successful with your e-mail marketing, you need to learn more advanced market segmentation methods.

Do You Know How To Use Market Segmentation To Improve Your E-Mail Marketing?

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Posted 7-23-08: Market Segmentation And E-Mail Marketing

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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?

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

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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.

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

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