Following the Hypersegmentation / Microsegmentation class in the SEM subject of the Master in Search Engines from UPF I'm teaching this week, I've found that in many cases, it's not easy to figure out who a company's market segments are (whether it's your own or for someone who hired you as a marketing specialist). So here are some tips on how to figure out who a company's market segments are:
1. Analyze and segment current customers.
It is always best to start by analyzing what the company is doing right now, so unless we are analyzing a start-up business, the first thing we should do is create a list of current customers and look for demographic and behavioral patterns.
My advice is to create an Excel spreadsheet and include the following fields: company name, business sector to which it belongs, services or products that it has contracted from you in the past, why you think it contracts the services, income it has generated for your company during the last year. If possible, also indicate the number of employees it has and where it is geographically located, as well as any other information that you think may be relevant.
By carefully analyzing this Excel sheet, we will discover patterns that will allow us to group customers according to behavior and certain attributes.
With this information we will have discovered the market segments that our company currently works with, and we will surely have already discovered some microsegments, although the interesting thing is to discover new microsegments to attack from now on, let's see how to do it.
2. Analyze the competition.
Another good way to discover who your market segments might be is by analyzing your competitors' communications and their websites.
If the website is well done, it will be customer-oriented and not product-oriented and you will be able to see which customer groups are targeted and what their value proposition is for each group. Unfortunately, most websites are product-oriented and it is not easy to see who they are targeting with information.
If the communication brochures have been produced by a marketing specialist, it will also be easy for them to give you clues about which market segments they are aimed at... but again, sometimes companies carry out marketing communication actions without having marketing specialists, so the resulting product is useless in terms of segmentation and value propositions for the market.
Analyzing the competition will also help us differentiate ourselves from it (if we want to carry out a differentiation strategy, obviously).
3. Investigate behavioral patterns.
Using certain tools we can know which web pages people who enter our website visit (through Google Analytics, for example) and what web pages people visit when they enter the competitor's website (via Alexa.com or through Google Trends for Websites, for example). With this information we can discover websites that compete with our company and types of clients that will help us to segment better.
Once the segmentation has been carried out and the possible market niches have been discovered, we must decide which of them we are going to attack (they will probably only be a few... although if we follow a "targeting" strategy, we will be able to target them in the future.long tail"we should try to reach as many small segments as possible).
Once this is decided, we can start the advertising campaigns we have in mind, segmenting them well, and we can prepare our website by targeting market segments and not products, and preparing landing pages for both SEO and SEM.
I hope that this information has been useful to you and that from now on it will be easier for you to discover market segments and that you can carry out your digital marketing actions taking microsegmentation into account.
A hug.
3 responses
Thanks for the tips. In any strategy, research plays a very important role.
Thanks Rashid. Based on your classes and others I've been teaching this week, I'm seeing that people are having a hard time thinking of specific market segments for their business sectors. If I have time, I'll do a series of articles discussing the main segments in different sectors.
Thank you very much for your contribution in the form of a comment. And again, thank you for the email you sent me.
A big hug Rashid.
Monts.
Thank you, the information on segmentation is very useful and as you explained in the course, most of them are indeed product-oriented and not customer-oriented (in almost all my websites they are like that), but what is difficult is finding value in segmentation by customers and not by products. Generally, people think about a product and that is what they are looking for, but they are looking for a product “for them”.
Very interesting in the change.