Most marketing successes begin and end with a narrow market segment that has been carefully explored and selected..
In other words, in these cases, businesses have found a group of potential customers that meet many of the criteria set by the business and motivated them to take action, that is, buy. Rarely is any business able to climb to the top by targeting a large number of customers without being selective.
If you cannot identify a narrow market segment that meets most of your standards, businesses may waste a lot of time, effort and money on marketing activities. However, in reality, there are still many businesses that fall into this situation. How to identify and penetrate a narrow market segment when a business wants to expand its operations? According to Kim T. Gordon, a regular writer for the "Marketing" column in Entrepreneur magazine, businesses can do the following three ways:
1. Review your current customer list
First, businesses need to carefully study their current customer list and divide them into many groups with similar characteristics. Next is to determine what characteristics the business's most potential customers have in common. This will help businesses identify a narrow market, including individuals who are most likely to become customers or purchase from the business many times. Then, choose appropriate media to carry out advertising and marketing activities targeting this customer audience. Of course, the marketing message must be presented in such a way that it is most attractive.
Let's say in the past, the business conducted marketing activities randomly and targeted all women between the ages of 25-49. To identify a new narrow market segment, businesses will first have to review and divide these customers into different groups. This division must be based on the criteria that the business sets to determine the best customer groups for itself. In this case, businesses can divide customers into groups: women who work outside, women who register to travel online, women who dine out more than six times in a month. By dividing customers into groups with similar characteristics, businesses will be able to discover some groups that only account for a small percentage of sales. These customer groups can become a separate narrow market segment and businesses need to carry out specific marketing campaigns with novel marketing messages or different offerings to reach them.
2. Satisfy an existing need
Sometimes a business does not have an existing customer base to define a new narrow market segment. In this case, you must make some preliminary assumptions about potential customers and focus on the customers you want to reach. The questions to ask are: Which customers already have a need for the products or services that the business wants to market? Which customers are buying similar products? Usually, it is easier to satisfy an existing need than to create a new one. So smart businesses often look for potential customers who already know what product they want to buy and are buying it somewhere.
Once there are potential customers who have a need for the product or service they are selling, businesses need to evaluate the offerings that competitors have offered to reach these customers. The only way to win against competitors is to understand them well and take measures to add new values to your products or services that competitors have not been able to provide to customers in a narrow segment. there.
3. Lower the cost of entering an existing market segment.
Another important advantage of entering an existing narrow market segment is that businesses will save a lot of costs. For example, the business is looking to sell its products to companies in the technology sector and law firms. But companies in the technology sector have not purchased such products, while law firms are using similar products but with limitations. In this case, the smart way for businesses is to penetrate the narrow market of law firms first, by offering more attractive offering conditions or creating more meaningful changes and benefits. than the products that these customers are buying. With such penetration, businesses do not have to spend a lot of time and effort explaining to potential customers why their products can meet their needs.
