Exploring and understanding market segments is a crucial requirement for every business owner.
“Content marketing hits the G-Spot when the reader proclaims…that this was written specifically with me in mind!” …this great quote from Jamie Tuner provides the focal length for marketing segmentation converging the images and copy into perfect focus.
Behind the scenes though a great deal of preparatory work is needed to achieve success and ensure that blurred lines do not creep back into the picture.
In its simplest form, the periodic table, is the first port of call for a straightforward segmentation of Gold, Silver and Bronze packages some supra Olympians may even introduce a Platinum package as well.
Traditionally marketers have conceptualised market segments into 4 distinct groups, psycho-graphic, behavioural, geographic and demographic. It is rare for SME’s do have the full resource spectrum to analyse all of these areas, so it is often better to categorise using the knowledge and data that resides within the customer.
As a minimum, an understanding of demographics is critical and a straightforward way of getting to grips with this, is the creation of “Personas” which represent both current and ideal customers. Given that few SME’s have the finances to pay for focus groups or conduct meaningful market research, persona creation is a great way of reverse engineering the segmentation conundrum.
Having identified one or two personas, a clearer picture of how to differentiate your services and align these to specific characteristics becomes both realistic and tangible and provides a great platform for the creation of market segments.
Here are 3 snippets of typical Doc Marketing personas :
- Persona 1 a therapist has been working in the industry for over 15 years. She embraced digital technology when it became popular in the noughties but has rarely updated her website. After an enthusiastic burst of blog writing she hasn’t updated her website content since 2013! Her website is nothing more than an outdated brochure site much in need of a revamp. Suggest course of action Re-energise with a Doc Marketing “Health Action Plan”
- Persona 2, a recently qualified osteopath who after working in a friend’s practice for 18 months has decided to start up his own business. Having borrowed a significant amount of money to get his practice airborne, he has managed to find premises, purchase apparatus and has decided to allocate money on marketing to get in new clients and create a business profile. Suggest course of action Marketing Road Map with a Doc Marketing “Health Check Up”
Persona 3, a dentist who has built a strong practice in the heart of the community within which she lives and works, now has the opportunity to acquire another practice. This will create a 2-centre practice in the same town with 6 full time practicing dentists and the potential to treble her turnover. Suggest course of action Marketing Workshop with key staff “Doc Marketing Health Transfusion”
We now have a categorised segmentation in place and this needs to be reflected within our existing contact database. Starting with outlook contacts we should start to look at overlaps from the above categories 1,2 or 3. Hopefully, nearly 2 years post GDPR this should not be too onerous a task?
Once this is in place, we can look at how to apply “different strokes for different folks”… targeting different messages and promotions to each persona through concerted campaigns.
Each campaign is unique and in need of measurement and review post -op. Available software such as Mailchimp allows you to do measure opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes and enables a good picture to be built up over time.
If you find your personas difficult to categorise and see them inhabiting shaded areas of your Venn diagram, then consider A/B Testing. This is where you send half the audience one campaign and the other half another as an initial trial. Depending on preliminary results you can then choose which campaign fits best with each persona and reappraise the situation.
In all cases re-measure, reappraise, review and if necessary re-stoke the fuel to ensure there is constant fire in your marketing engine!
