Market Segment Hide and Seek: Effective Tips On Defining your Desired Consumer Base.

Howdy Gorilla buds,

Happy 2011 and welcome to a spanking new decade! It took a few days to brush off the crumbs from the holiday festivities but I think we're all recovered, rested and ready to take on this year like a raging bull.

To kick off the year, I wanted to talk about probably the biggest question mark for a business owner - how the heck do I find clients? Surprisingly ( and a little scary), some business still play the blanket game. Try and reach a million people and hope one bites. Not so effective Jefe. Not effective at all.

In the past, marketers depended on big media for information dissemination. Not anymore - Hooray! Today, businesses both small and large can reach their target market directly.

We can talk to them one-on-one, get to know them, understand them and learn their motivators.

But how do we find out who we're supposed to talk to?

Market Segmentation (splitting up the consumer market to learn more about who to approach and who to ignore) borders on the more science-y part of marketing. Who knew marketing was more than counting how many cars you can post your fliers on? huh. With market segmentation, marketers can narrow down the characteristics of their desired target market and maybe even create a whole niche for themselves. Cause competitors are a pain.

Here's a hypothetical example.

If I owned a house-cleaning service in the San Diego area, I would discover that there are over 100 house cleaning services in the same 50-mile radius. That's 100 competitors. At this point I would do a bit more research on who uses house- cleaning services and discover that majority are working moms aged 30 to 55, English speaking, from dual income house-holds.

Lets call this segment Group A. My research further reveals that this group resides in suburban areas, mainly in North county of San Diego, they make over $50,000 per year and have school-age children. They are majority Republican, practicing Christians, and enjoy outdoor activities. They have trouble juggling work and family responsibilities and often feel guilty if one arena of their lives overtakes the other (work v. home). If I decided to dig just a little further, I could find that Group A also finds time to support their local charities and that the battered women's shelter is their preferred charity. I will also find that most of my competitors are targeting this group.

With this information, we can distinguish between who to target and who isn't interested in house-cleaning services thereby, limiting money spent on tryng to reach everyone. Also, if all my competitors are trying to get to this group, maybe there's another group that hasn't been tapped into, or there's a motivator that hasn't been utilized. Phew, Ok school's over.

Next week we will talk a bit about POSITIONING which in simple terms means - designing/creating your role to your target market. Positioning touches more about niches and messaging and sheds a little light on recognizing an untapped market :) In the meantime...

A little homework for you business owners,and aspiring business owners, or anyone else interested in this stuff.

1. Define your target market based on gender (if relevant), age, primary language - e.g. Men, aged 18 to 25, primary language -English.
2. Break up your target market into 2 or more sub-groups with any other characteristics. e.g. play video games, vegetarian. (Note: See how many you can create)
3. Share your work with the forum. I think all our readers including myself could benefit from your response.

Until next week folks - keep learning. Your target market is made up of people and people are bloody complicated.

KBG~