According to Wikipedia – “Market segmentation is a marketing strategy which involves dividing a broad target market into subsets of consumers, businesses, or countrieswho have, or are perceived to have, common needs, interests, and priorities, and then designing and implementing strategies to target them. Market segmentation strategies are generally used to identify and further define the target customers, and provide supporting data for marketing plan elements such as positioning to achieve certain marketing plan objectives. Businesses may develop product differentiation strategies, or anundifferentiated approach, involving specific products or product lines depending on the specific demand and attributes of the target segment.”
In the internet and mobile marketing worlds, site visitors can be segmented or attached to different attributes such as: demographics, purchase history, browsing behavior, age and so forth. This gives marketers extra building blocks for segmentation.
“A marketer could conceivably segment within product categories, within lifetime value tiers, by offer type; the opportunities for granularity are nearly limitless. Further, advances in automated modeling enable marketers to use the characteristics that define the segments as predictors of similar prospects. This enables marketers to craft segmented offers, messaging, and placement strategies, and address new prospects that likely fall into the segments, at scale,” says Paolo DiVincenzo from iMediaConnection.
Big things are on the horizon involving segmentation. It’s time to being considering shifting from our old way of only matching up buyers and non-buyers and starting to see the bigger more truly data driven picture. You might be surprised where it takes you.
