What is Segmentation?

If you are being a guest here more than once, you are already familiar with how obsessed I am with target audience.

‍

Indeed, all the efforts in the business game is done to attract him/her: your potential customer. But, can you sell them your service/product without truly knowing who they are? It's like trying to sell a pair of Nikes in the country of snakes. You may be the G.O.A.T. of what you produce, but it's impossible to find customers if your audience cannot find it valuable.

‍

With a quick reverse engineering, it's obvious that we buy things because we find them functional and satisfying.

‍

We, as an entrepreneur, have to evoke two things in our audience to sell anything:

1. Functional benefit — your product/service needs to be a real solution for their pain point
2. Emotional benefit — your product/service needs to satisfy their desires

‍

That means, if you sell a pair of Nike to a runner, you actually sell:

1. The advantage of speed, aerodynamics, comfort and handling the road.
2. The feeling of fulfillment of being her own hero, overcoming challenges, and winning.

‍

BUT...

‍

Without knowing what problems they face everyday, what their desires are, you cannot sell. The first rule of selling is filling a gap in their lives. This gap can be embraced either by a desire, or by a fear, or sometimes it can be both. But for each case, the key is KNOWING THEM WELL.

‍

Know me. Anticipate my needs. Make my life simple. Look out for me. Reward me.

Chris Do, "Pocket Full of Do"

‍

What if you want to sell to everyone?

‍

First of all, you cannot sell to everyone. Some will be your brand's believers, while some will be atheists. Don't waste time with atheists, but always prefer to consolidate your believers. This is not my opinion, it's the secret behind successful brands.

‍

Segmentation is a shortcut to analyze your audience in specific groups of people. It's a categorization that helps you to understand how you can market to different types of people. In order to build a community of believers of your brand, you have to do this segmentation to filter out your potential customers/clients.

‍

How many types of segmentation are there?

‍

Let's have a look at different segmentation types and segmentation examples to answer that question.

‍

1. Demographic Segmentation

What's demographic segmentation?

It's basically creating small sets out of your customers based on their,

• gender
• age
• income
• religion
• ethnicity
• level of education
• professional role, etc.

‍

A good example of demographic segmentation might be: "18-25-year old, modern, LGBTQ activist, Asian-American, creative women"

‍

2. Behavioristic Segmentation

What's behavioristic segmentation (or, behavioral segmentation)?

It's creating small sets of people based on their behavior changes depending on the changed circumstances.

‍

It's regarding their

• spending habits
• purchasing habits
• browsing habits (online)
• loyalty to the brand, etc.

‍

Let's give an example of a man, who just learns that his wife is pregnant to their first child, sells their fancy sports car to buy a family size SUV.

‍

3. Geographic Segmentation

What's geographic segmentation?

It's creating small sets of people based on their location, language, timezone, culture and climate.

‍

A classic example is Coca-Cola's geographic segmentation that targets Muslim families in Ramadan with its commercials.

‍

Another example I can give is differentiating your messages depending on the local weather. One good slogan to target the people who lives with mostly hot, sunny weather in Barcelona may not be the best idea for the customers in Stockholm.

‍

4. Psychographic Segmentation

What's psychographic segmentation?

It's creating small sets of people based on their common psychology regarding their shared values, goals and experiences.

‍

The examples are: Generation-Z, entrepreneurs, Republicans, Spurs fans, etc.

‍

***

How to use market segmentation?

‍

Some sources mention a couple of more types of segmentation, but these four are the mostly used to determine the target audience.

‍

Whatever our effort to segment our audience is, first we need to pin the idea that OUR CUSTOMERS ARE HUMAN BEINGS and hence, they have desires, fears, problems and pain points that are waiting to be solved.

‍

Our job, as entrepreneurs, branders and marketers, is to first: analyze who they are, and second: empathize with them.

‍

If and only if we visualize them in front of us just like a real person, it's possible to "feel" them.

‍

Then, it's just a matter of branding to differentiate our solution and voila! We are unstoppable.

‍

Segmentation isn’t just about your business reaching customers more effectively – it’s also about those customers seeing messaging that is more relevant to them!

Yieldify.com Blog, "4 Types of Market Segmentation With Real-World Examples"

‍

Please feel free to reach out to me by booking a suitable day for a free talk.

‍

Check out the button on your upper-right!

‍

***

‍Imagery:

Kaboompics, Pexels.com

Mentatdgt, Pexels.com

Ketu Tsubiyanto, Pexels.com

Jagmeet Singh, Pexels.com

Jose Antonio Gallego Vazquez, Pexels.com

Coca-Cola Africa official account, Twitter.com

‍