Understanding Market Segmentation and Targeting

Segmentation is the process of identifying and selecting one or more market segments to which a business or organization can target. Segmentation can be based on gender, age bracket/group, nationality, political/religious beliefs, etc.

Segmentation is considered as an adaptive strategy because it has been a common practice among many organizations to adapt to the market needs based on the results of the segmentation They can change their identities, develop new products or even modify their advertising campaigns with market segmentation using some proving marketing manual

But in actual fact, segmentation doesn't always have to be a purely adaptive strategy. With segmentation, a marketer can choose which of the segments he is well suited to serve, thus allowing him to have competitive advantages over his competitors for that particular market segment.

Regardless of how it is incorporated into the marketing activities, the aim of segmentation enable companies and marketers to provide higher values to their potential customers by letting them know who they are catering to and letting them address the specific needs and concerns of that target market segment.

When done with segmentation, the next thing to do is to target all efforts and focus them on the identified market segment. Marketers will create a marketing campaign that will fulfill the needs, as well as the market condition, of the target market segment.

For example, an online marketers who promotes his products through a websites that has been filled with generic pages can carry out market segmentation on one of the page. Let say he finds out that more men than women are visiting that page, he will look for other variables like a dominant age group of the visitors. He will now use these variables to improve his site conversion rate by improvising the following methods:

• If he has already known that men outnumber women on most social networks, then he can make his page clean and easy to understand. Also, he will link it to his Facebook fan page and put a note on his page telling his target audience how they can follow him on Twitter.
• He can either import 3rd party reviews to his page or ask his customers to write reviews for him in exchange for some incentives. He will need to be creative here.
• He can use straightforward language and present his information in bulleted form to make it easy to look at and understand. Better yet he can try to provide all the information his audience need in a single mouse click.
• He can also try to improve his page content clarity by using some images that appeal to his target market segment . He will need to do some test (using proven tool ) to find out what work and what does not.

Segmentation as explained above can provide both manufacturers and marketers a fair amount of information upon which to build their product web page. If everything is done correctly, it is very likely that the web page will have higher bounce rate and more click-through.