11 Questions EVERY Marketer Needs to Ask (online segmentation and targeting)
Everyone puts their online marketing plans together in a different way. Some have a checklist, some look at other plans and replicate, some wing it. I ask questions.
I’ve found that asking questions allows me to focus my brainstorms and instead of putting me into a ‘do this and this and this’ frame of mind, it allows me to explore and delve deep into the possibilites that make sense for the particular product/service I’m working on. Asking focused questions opens potential doors and leaves my mind’s options open, rather than specifically defining its path. Sure, when you get down to it, it’s semantics. But hey, it works better than any other process I’ve found. Who am I to argue?
I have a specific set of questions that I ask when developing any new marketing plan. These questions have been amassed over the years when I found something in particular helped, there was an idea I routinely needed to keep in mind, or just thought it was a good concept to consider. As the list has gotten longer, I’ve divided it into categories:
- pricing
- segmentation and targeting
- product/positioning/differentiation
- branding and message creation
- sales and pushing the purchase
- message delivery
- PR
- customer relationship management
I’ve found that the difference between a successful marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one, is sometimes very small. Some missed piece or an overlooked detail. Using this site as a platform, I’ve decided to share my ‘marketing questions’ with you.
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Undressing Your Market
Since I’m a fan of going out of sequence, I’m first going to focus on online segmentation and targeting. To run through the basics really quick, the idea behind segmentation is to figure out who your product’s audience is and who it can be. You can divide a market by demographic (income, gender, etc), psychographic (beliefs), socio-cultural (class, relation to others) and location. You want to figure out exactly WHO could potentially be interested in purchasing your product. The more defined your segmentation (getting into their heads, undressing them and figuring out what they want), the more defined, and potentially succesful, your marketing campaign will be.
Your overall message and marketing campaign will be based on how you determine and examine your target market.
Why Is Segmenting Important Online?
In a word, segmentation and targeting is HUGELY important in the online environment. It’s no different than offline. How you segment your market determines how you’ll craft the message your audience will see, what websites you advertise on, what medium you’ll use to deliver your message, who you should partner with for a joint venture and what approach your marketing strategy will take. Literally EVERYTHING starts with segmentation and because a marketing strategy builds on itself, missed steps and cut corners in the beginning can kill a campaign and product.
Best Bets
There’s a big push in the last few years to focus marketing efforts on small segments of the population. The belief here is that the better you segment and target, the more marketing resources you’ll save and the more influential your message will be. This allows small brands to effectively make a big splash with small segments and big brands to create multiple messages (for the same product) that appeal to many different segments.
Of course, the philosophy here is to define what your ‘best bet’ is. The answer to the question of “Who’s most likely to purchase our product?”, will be your money segment. Putting marketing dollars here will give the most likely returns. However, actually figuring out which segment you’ll go after, is a question of your targeting.
Bullseye Targeting
How you decide to “address” your segment(s) is defined by targeting. You’ve heard the term “mass marketing”, right? This is simply a targeting strategy. There are generally 3 ways to target a market.
- the shotgun approach (otherwise known as mass marketing) in which the business delivers their product’s message to everyone, regardless of demographic, etc.
- singular message and segment, where 1 specific segment is chosen to exclusively deliver a message to (hopefully, the biz has chosen the segment most likely to purchase their product).
- multiple messages, multiple segments, in which the business (usually with a hefty marketing budget) creates a set of specific messages for different segments. An example of this might be if Pepsi decides to market Mountain Dew with mountain bike commercials to outdoor sports fanatics, a caffeine message to gamers and a counter-culture message to 20-somethings who are unhappy with the current administration.
So basically, segmentation and targeting go hand-in-hand. The population you’re going to market to is defined and your strategy for targeting them with your message is initiated. It can get as scientific as the business wants and has a budget for. Fortune 500 companies spend some serious coin finding out who is and who could be interested in their products. Smaller companies that don’t operate on these budgets can do a pretty bang up job with some simple brainstorming sessions.
Getting Drunk on Market Research
If you can afford it, market research is something that’s easy to spend a LOT of money on. But, how much do those extra dollars help? I think of market research like wine. Big companies can afford a $200 bottle. Small companies can squeek out a respectable $50 bottle. Sure, the $200 bottle might be better, but is it really worth the extra $150? There’s a lot you can deduce through sole observation and some of the most intriguing, innovative and influential marketing campaigns have come from the grey matter of one guy.
So, how’s the small company segment and target its market? Try asking some questions:
The Questions
1. Who’s most interested? What does your product do and who’s most likely to be interested in your product or service? Pinpoint an initial ‘most interested’ group.
2. WHO are they? What are their characteristics? Who are they? Think in terms of:
income, age, sex, geographics, income, class, interests, dislikes, habits, desires, beliefs, fears
3. Where’s the inequity? Which of these characteristics is applicable to the product you offer? In other words, which desire, fear or interest from the question above is ‘fed’ by your product?
4. Who else is… You’ve already pinpointed an initial group that you think likely to be interested in your product and the characteristic that makes them interested. Here comes the big question: What other groups exhibit the same trait or characteristic that could make them likely buyers too?
(example: Fanta, the orange softdrink, started a marketing campaign a little while ago targeting the hispanic community. They successfully broadened their share of the market simply by first identifying a new group of potential users and then crafting a message specifically for them).
OR another way to think of it is…
Subgrouping: You’ve established that a certain group of people will be interested in your product. What are the subgroups of this group? (example: You’re selling a weight loss product. Of course, the most interested group will be people who want to lose weight. However, this is a massive market with many different, definable groups within it. There are overweight 50-something men who are getting ready to retire, middle aged women who want to look like they did at 20, overweight teenagers who want to get a date, etc. You can go on and on and on. Each of these groups are VERY different than the others, would require a different message be delivered to them and through a different medium. Are there any )
5. Best bets. Are any of these groups a better bet than others? Does your product’s ethos ‘fit’ with any particular group?
6. One or multiple messages, one or multiple segments? Can you fit your product to multiple groups? Should the message (marketing) they receive differ between them?
7. Holes in the competition. Who is NOT being targeted by competitors that may be interested in your product/service?
8. Separating the wheat from the chaff. How can you separate the buyers from the non-buyers? (For example, if you have a product that appeals to a certain ‘type’ of rugby player, can you somehow separate the interested parties from the uninterested by behavior?)
9. Would-be buyers. Is there an audience that could be buyers, but are not? Who are they? Why are they not buying your offering? How can you either change the product/service or its position to garner this audience? (based on behavior, demographic, interest, media exposure, etc)
10. Layers of interest. Most products have multiple layers of interest. For example, say you own a theatre (plays, not movies). Each play will appeal to people who like plays - obviously. So, those interested in plays will be one target market. However, each play is about something. One play is about tennis. Another play is about living in the city. Another is about aliens. Each and every one of these plays will appeal not only to people who like plays, but also to people who like it’s specific subject matter. So the question is, what other layers of interest might your product have and who ELSE might be interested in it?
11. Eyeball Parties: Where do my target audience’s eyeballs gather? What common events, activities, websites, reading materials, interests, etc, do they participate in? (this will be considered in much greater detail with message creation and delivery, but should be thought about now also)
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