| I meet small business owners all the time and get the chance
to ask them lots of questions. One of the things that I ask
quite often is “who is going to buy from you?” And
the answer far too often is “anybody.”
The problem here is that there is no business in the world that
everyone buys from. A cake shop in Brighton
is not going to be patronised by someone from South Africa.
Even B&Q and Marks and Spencers have specific groups of
people that they appeal to, and groups who would rarely, if
ever, go to one of their shops.
If you don’t know who you want to sell to, you have no
way of knowing how to sell to them. And even if you have discovered
a way of making sure no-one ever gets cancer, you still have
to find a way of telling people that it’s available.
The better and clearer a picture of your target market you have,
the easier it’s going to be to reach out to them and politely
say “hello, would you like to buy my product/service.”
In fact if you can get this right, you might not even have to
do that, you can have people queuing up to buy from you.
The traditional way of segmenting your market
Traditional marketers will tell you that you need to segment
(chop up) your market according to:
- Demographics (age, gender, lifestyle)
- Geography (where are they physically)
And if you're selling to businesses
- Business sector
- Size of business
While these are definitely a useful starting point, it doesn't
take you very far because it's not nearly specific enough.
You can be more sophisticated than these simple categories,
by looking at why they buy from you.
A more sophisticated approach to market segmentation
Everyone buys because we have needs. I buy food because I need to eat. I buy a
computer because I need to be able to write articles, use the
internet and send emails. Sometimes these are basic needs (somewhere
to live, security, food) and often they are much more sophisticated.
But every time that you sell to someone you are fulfilling
a need for them.
So, as well as the basic categories above, you can think about
needs you can satisfy for your potential customers. For example
Joy of Business clients BN2Ltd
meet the need for businesses to save money on their print
costs. A secondary need is for businesses to save time because
BN2 will pick up artwork from the designer, check it's all in
the right formats etc and then deliver the print.
What picture of clients would you build up for BN2Ltd?
We thought of:
- designers (so they can save money and increase their profit margins when they charge the print to their clients)
- Businesses that need printed materials, but don't want to get involved in commissioning the print or finding the best cost.
Vertical markets
But that's still quite general isn't it? After looking at the reasons why people
might buy, we looked at vertical markets. Who
uses lots of printed material, but isn't a designer? We thought
of different groups of companies who have a lot of marketing
or office material, and targeted them. Estate agents and solicitors
were two of the vertical markets that we came up with.
Profiling customers
You can go further with this and profile your customers. Profiling
takes all of these techniques and creates a picture of different
customer groups. So Celia (our typical customer for a holiday company) might be the type of customer who
goes on holiday once a year with her boyfriend and wants somewhere
romantic and different each time because this is her special
holiday. She has the money to pay for a lovely holiday, but
doesn't have much time to arrange it. Celia works for a large
bank in London and earns £45k pa, she has no children and pays
for everything on credit cards.
You can see how the holiday company could work up quite a sophisticated
picture of the imaginary Celia, and perhaps check this out with
market research of their existing customers. This picture already
tells them that they need to be able take credit cards, and
give Celia a very clear and simple way to book her holiday.
It also gives them an idea of what newspapers Celia reads and
what websites she might look at, which is all valuable information
for planning advertising and PR.
If you would like some help to get to grips with your target
market or you’ve done some of the work outlined above
and want to know how to take it forward to make sure that you’re
reaching all those potential customers out there, then get
in touch for a one off marketing session.
Julia Chanteray
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