A market segment defined target wards against ineffective marketing by saving you from wasting your time and money and by enhancing effectiveness of marketing messages.
If you haven’t defined a target market for your business, then that’s the best way to make your marketing more effective.
It seems that in every book or e-book about marketing, marketing experts speak about the importance of choosing and catering to a target market for your business.
A Market Segment Defined Target Wards Against Wasting Marketing Money
If you are marketing to everybody, you are essentially marketing to nobody. That’s why mass marketing is ineffective for all but companies with the deepest pockets.
As a small business owner, with limited marketing resources, you have to get a good return from your marketing resources. If you market without a target market, you’re wasting all marketing resources that don’t cater to people likely to buy your product or service.
For instance if you have a bookkeeping service for small businesses and advertise in your local newspaper, only a small percentage of the people who see the advertisement have businesses, and then only a percentage of business owners will need or want your product or service.
Yet you pay for the complete circulation of the newspaper. If 10,000 people subscribe to the newspaper, but only ten percent of subscribers are business owners, you’re paying to reach 10,000 people, but you’re only reaching 1,000 potential customers.
Furthermore, all business owners won’t need your bookkeeping service. Some will have full time bookkeepers who do their bookkeeping. Some just take receipts to their accountants and let the accountants work from the receipts. Some are small enough that they can do their own bookkeeping.
So it’s likely that only 25 percent of the small business owners subscribing to the newspaper are potential customers. If that’s the case, you’re paying to reach 10,000 people, but only reach 250 potential customers. What a waste of your resources.
A Market Segment Defined Target Wards Against Ineffective Marketing Messages
Once you’ve defined your target market, you can learn much about the people in that market that will make your marketing messages more effective.
You need to know:
what their characteristics are,
what they value,
what they are concerned about,
what they need and want,
who influences them, and
what media they prefer.
Armed with this information, you can create marketing messages that appeal to your target market. But if you create marketing messages without this information, your potential customers will likely just ignore your messages.
So you need this information on your target market, but getting it requires days or weeks of research.
A Market Segment Defined Target Wards Against Wasting Marketing Time
If you’re not a researcher and have no one on your staff who is, doing this research yourself will spend time that will serve you better spent differently. And there is no reason for you to do it yourself.
I’ve done the work for you in profiles. You can access them from the page linked below:
This post ends my series on market segmentation examples. It provides characteristics to use in your marketing when targeting university faculty.
If you missed the first post, which gives demographics on all three market segmentation examples, you can get to it by clicking on the link in this sentence.
Shared Characteristics
For University Faculty
The most shared characteristics for university faculty relate to family, work, finances, education and home.
Family And Work Characteristics
Family (red) and work (blue) are most important to university faculty. Both are mentioned six times across six segments.
Family characteristics include:
Selecting a mate,
Parenting,
Accepting growing children, reassessing marriage, relating to teenage children and aging parents,
Balancing work and family,
Valuing family.
Financial Characteristics
Finances (green) are important because educators generally make less than they would practicing what they teach. Thus, their friends with similar education levels and work dedication usually make more money.
This creates a constant reminder that they aren’t doing as well financially as they could be and probably should be. Finances are mentioned five times across four segments.
Financial characteristics include:
Being materialistic,
Being concerned about finances, and
Valuing money.
Education And Home Characteristics
Education (purple) and homes (gold) both provide two mentions across two segments.
Education characteristics include:
Being well educated (across 2 segments)
Home characteristics include:
Valuing homes and
Establishing a home.
Market Segmentation Examples
University Faculty Conclusion
All of these shared characteristics provide important marketing appeals for university faculty.
Emphasizing family and work in marketing appeals will touch university faculty. They value family and work, and seek balance between these sometimes conflicting values.
Financies make for stronger appeals than education and homes.
You can get my target market profile on university faculty by clicking on the link in this sentence.
If you want to discover how I constructed the table on university faculty below, you can get my free report by completing the form below:
Posted 12-18-09:
Market Segmentation Example
University Faculty
This third post on market segmentation examples provides characteristics for professional Boomer women.
If you missed the first post, which provided demographics for all three market segmentation examples, you can read it by clicking the link in this sentence.
Shared Characteristics For Professional Boomer Women
After constructing your table (matrix), you can quickly see the most shared characteristics. For example, I found the most important shared characteristics for professional Boomer women to relate to family. finances, work and education.
Family Characteristics
The most shared characteristic and the best appeal for professional Boomer women is family (red). It is mentioned in different ways six times across four segments. Family characteristics include:
Valuing family (crosses three segments)
Relating to teenagers and aging parents,
Accepting growing children, reassessing marriage, relating to teenage children and aging parents,
Launching children, adjusting to an empty nest, handling increased demands of older parents, supporting college-aged children or ailing parents.
Financial Characteristics
Financial characteristics (green) are mentioned three times across two segments. Because of their professional jobs and their empty-nest status, finances are less important to these women than to most. Financial characteristics include:
Being materialistic,
Meeting many obligations on limited incomes, and
Considering finances a major concern.
Work And Education Characteristics
Two other characteristics are mentioned two times across teo segments. Work (blue) and education (purple) appear to be of equal concerns for these women. This commonality is understandable because of the relationship between education and occupation. These women have professional jobs because they have college educations, and they want at least that for their children. Work characteristics include:
Adjusting to realities of work, and
Working hard and long hours.
Education characteristics include
Being well educated, and
Valuing education.
Home Characteristics
The last shared characteristic relates to their homes. Professional women generally work long hours. So they are in their homes less than many women. In addition, the age of Boomers indicates that most have had their homes established long enough for them to be comfortable, yet not long enough for them to be in need of much repair. Homes are important to them. They are just a low priority at this point in their lives. Still valuing homes crosses three market segments.
Market Segmentation Examples
Professional Boomer Women Conclusion
Professional Boomer women will be around as target markets for four more decades. Many businesses will seek their support, their patronage, and their money.
Businesses that can assist them in retaining their financial security, holding off aging with healthy life styles, enjoying life, reaching their potential, becoming more self fulfilled, and making a social contribution should fare well during those four decades.
To discover how my market segmentation process provides a table of characteristics like the one on this post, you can get my free report by completing the form at the below:
Posted 12-16-09: Market Segmentation Examples
Professional Boomer Women
This post shows you how to discover psychographic, behavioral and other characteristics for Investors by using a matrix like the one below:
I briefly explain my market segmentation process in this post. If you want further instruction, complete the form below. Then I’ll send you my special report.
How I Made This Investor Matrix
Using the demographics from my first post on Market Segmentation Examples, I determined social class, generation, life stages, and lifestyle. By copying and pasting rows from the appropriate segments, I was able to produce this Investors matrix. The column headings vary, but that’s okay because the columns aren’t important. The idea is to determine which characteristics repeat across rows.
How To Determine Shared Characteristics
I colored some words and phrases in the matrix to show the shared characteristics. I look for those characteristics repeated across rows and color code them. Then I summarize the shared characteristics like below:
Financial Characteristics
Financial considerations (green) provide the most shared characteristic for investors, mentioned five times across four rows. Investors work with financial information everyday. They evaluate the financial criteria of companies in which to invest. Their personal financial security and that of people they represent depends on their decisions. Thus, finances become an important part of their lives. Financial characteristics include:
Managing their investments,
Buying luxury items to demonstrate wealth or status,
Being frugal and materialistic,
Considering finances a major concern,
Managing budgets, and
Financing new leisure time.
Work Characteristics
Work (blue) is also mentioned three times across three segments. Considering that Investors’ work is financially related, work could be grouped with finances to make a characteristic mentioned seven times across four segments. Work characteristics include:
Seeking out visibility and high-prestige occupations,
Spending much of their time on their careers,
Reexamining work, and
Adjusting to realities of work.
Family Characteristics
Family (red) is the second most shared characteristic, mentioned three times across three rows. Family characteristics include:
Considering family important,
Marrying outside class if comparable in prestige, political power and influence,
Accepting growing children, reassessing marriage, relating to teenage children and aging parents,
Launching children, adjusting to an empty nest, handling increased demands of older parents, supporting college-aged children or ailing parents.
Market Segmentation Examples
Investors Conclusion
Knowing shared characteristics for Investors will help you whether you’re trying to sell a product or service to investors, or you want to attract investors for your business.
The investors market segmentation matrix reveals that the best appeals for investors are financial, work and family related. Listing the characteristics in this matrix will further clarify the best expression of these appeals.
To read more about investors, see How To Market To Investors. To read the next post in this series, click the link below:
If you like this series and want to know when I publish another post relevant to your business, subscribe to my blog by completing the form below. Then I’ll send you weekly post summaries. Plus I’ll give you my Matrix Market Segmentation report.
Knowing how to market to Arab Americans is important if you are a small business owner or marketer who needs to target Arab Americans?
If your target market includes Arab Americans, you must know the truth about them. Three million Arabs are Americans. They came to America to escape political injustice and to seek economic opportunities. They have demonstrated their loyalty and courage to this nation through many decades. Plus they have qualities that, as a business owner, you will want to consider for your target market.
Arab Americans represent one of the nation’s wealthiest and most politically powerful minority groups. Their average household income exceeds national medians by 18 percent. Almost 90 percent are registered voters, compared to 62 percent of the total population. Plus they support candidates and run for offices themselves.
You need to know how this target market differs internally. They differ by national origin, the time when they came to the USA, and by religion. Unlike the stereotype, only 23 percent of Arab Americans are Muslim.
What Are The Benefits Of Knowing
Arab American Characteristics?
The more you know about Arab Americans, the more effectively you can market to them. Benefits include that you can:
Sell Arab Americans more of the kinds of products and services they want by discovering how and on what, they spend their money.
More successfully relate to Arab Americans by understanding their values, attitudes, and concerns.
Create effective messages and deliver your messages through media that will reach Arab Americans by discovering the most effective media to reach them and the type of information that will best appeal to them.
Market effectively to Arab Americans as a whole and to smaller niches by discovering differences by gender and age.
Discover even more ways to improve your marketing by determining addition characteristics of Arab Americans.
How To Get Arab Americans Characteristics To Use In Your Marketing
So how do you get good solid information for marketing to Arab consumers?
You can either spend days gathering the research yourself.
You can spend $100s or $1000s paying a marketing agency to do it for you, or
You can spend just $7 on my target market profile of Arab Americans and get the information immediately.
How To Purchase My Arab American Profile
To order your copy of my inexpensive Generation X Target Market Profile:
Click on the “Add to Cart” button below.
You’ll be taken to PayPal where you can pay with a credit card or your PayPal account.
After you pay you’ll be taken to a download page. The download page doesn’t look the same as my blog. Don’t let that confuse you. You’ll find the download link on the page.
Click on the download link. Your download will start.
When it’s finished, be sure to save it where you can find it.
Your credit card will be charged $7 for the Arab American Profile. Your order is guaranteed as follows:
If within 30 days, You are not dissatisfied with Arab American Profile in any way, your refund request will be honored.
If you don’t get your Generation X Profile, email me or go to my contact page to get my telephone number and call me.
Please Note: If you pay with a credit card at PayPal, you have to click the button “Return To Merchant” in order to be directed to the download page.
Copyright – Best Books Plus, Inc.: Marketing To Arab Consumers
Linda holds a Doctorate in Education (Ed.D.) and is accredited in Public Relations (APR). She has practiced marketing, public relations and communication skills for over 30 years. She is President of Best Books Plus, Inc., an online and off line publishing company.
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