Best Practice using Market Segmentation Advice for 2019

Today, we’re going to list some of the market segmentation best practices used by the most effective digital marketers so that you can take advantage of their expertise and include these activities into your own business marketing strategies.

1. Ascertain – and set out your business goals and objectives so that your digital marketing activities and market segmentation processes are tailored to achieve a successful outcome.
2. Determine – the specific marketing objectives of your marketing activities so that you can set milestones that can be used to measure the success of your campaign.
3. Identify Your Target Audience – this is the group of ideal customers for your services, and then focus your sales and marketing efforts on them.
4. Understand – the different factors that drive your market so that you can develop realistic projections of the opportunities that exist within your target segment of the market.
5. Market Segmentation – involves using a combination of data analysis and intuition so that you can refine your efforts and deliver an effective marketing strategy. The target segment will be a group of potential customers who have similar attributes in terms of their need, desire and ability to buy your service.
6. Be Bold – when developing clearly defined target segments and don’t be afraid of focusing on a single or select few segments.
7. Vital Information – on how fast the market will grow and what its growth potential looks like can be gathered from industry sources
8. Prioritise Investments – by focusing on a few key characteristics of your ideal target customer and concentrating your efforts on those in order to deliver an accurate and focused marketing campaign for your services.
9. Market Trend Insights – should be used to gain a comprehensive understanding of the factors currently driving your market and develop realistic projections of the opportunities that exist within your target segment.
10. Monitor Success – to determine if additional details, new segments or adjustment to existing segments will be necessary to achieve your business goals.
11. Identify – current and future growth opportunities within your market using the information gathered.
12. Harness the Power – of proven Business Models to prioritise resources and marketing efforts.
13. Think – of your market segmentation efforts as an archery target with the bullseye as your perfect target customer. The next ring will comprise other prospects who are similar to your perfect customer, having the same needs and attributes, whilst the outer ring of the archery target will contain the prospects who actively find you when searching online.
14. Gather Information – about the size of your bullseye segment and of the other rings in your target to ascertain that there are sufficient market opportunities available to meet your revenue targets.
15. Establish – a consistent customer profile data collection and management process and use it to support the ongoing definition and refinement of target segment profiles in order to achieve increased sales.
16. Qualification Attributes – from potential customers in the outer rings should be used by sales personnel to ensure that a buyer’s needs do not differ significantly from the target segment.
17. Do Not Divert – scarce resources supporting a customer who is unique and unlike the rest of your customer base.
18. Sales Personnel – should understand that, as you move further away from the bullseye, the marketing personnel will not be investing in content and activity to attract any opportunities that may be worth pursuing.
19. Marketing Personnel – should offer sales personnel tactical support as long as the efforts do not negatively impact their ability to focus on the bullseye segment.
20. Clear Segmentation Criteria – are vital to qualify and prioritise leads in order to increase sales.
21. Create – unified customer data profiles that you can use to enhance the customer journey and increase ROI.
22. Expand – your marketing efforts into other segments using information and guidance from the archery target approach as your business increases.
23. Be Aware – that you may need to use multiple target segments right from the beginning if your target segment is large. For example, if you are covering a national market and your geographies require slightly different go-to-market strategies due to regional compliance or other regional requirements.
24. Keep it Simple – should you determine that you need multiple segments, aim for similarity across all of them so that you’re not pulled in several different directions.
25. Avoid Establishing – too many targets as this will have a negative impact on your ability to focus effectively on how marketing and sales resources are allocated.
26. Use this Approach – to optimize your marketing activity and focus on an existing target segmentation strategy. Use the same model when expanding your operational activity.
27. Optimise The Customer Experience – customer journey mapping, combined with developing personas, is an essential component when optimising the customer experience (CX). A massive 74% of the most effective B2C marketers personalise content for their target audiences.
28. Highly-Targeted Personalised Strategies – will help you to cut through content overload and stand out against other marketing campaigns. This all hinges on developing a more comprehensive understanding of your customers so that your marketing activities and content can be uniquely tailored to appeal to them.
29. Aligning Sales And Marketing Activity – best practice is defined as the effective planning, communication and collaboration between the Sales and Marketing teams, something that is often overlooked. Segregated teams mean limited communications resulting in shared lead data negatively affecting ROI and lead conversion.  Collaboration – between Sales and Marketing results in a level of transparency which begins with working out a mutually agreed definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and shared KPI progress.  An effective alignment with the Sales team enables marketers to track and convert leads in an effective manner.
30. Sales Personnel – need the correct lead data in order to convert leads into new customers and alignment of Sales and Marketing is essential for this to take place. This means that both teams should collaborate effectively and communicate regularly in order to achieve:
    1. Shared goals
    2. A mutually agreed lead definition
    3. A mutually agreed lead management process
    4. Mutually agreed service level agreements.

If you don’t have the time or marketing expertise to create an effective marketing campaign based on the advice we’ve given (and don’t want to hire a full time marketing professional to do it for you), why not get in touch and let the marketing experts at Emarkable create the digital marketing plan that will take your business to the next level?

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