MarketingLAUNCH.com

Market Segmentation: Dividing your market into smaller sets of prospects who share certain characteristics; you need to segment and prioritize your markets. 

For online marketing initiatives, you need to locate the various sites on the Internet where your target audience hangs out, so you need to know who they are.  (Please keep in mind your online target audience might differ slightly from your offline audience.  You discover the variations only by experience.)

 Types of Market Segmentation: 

• Demographic segmentation (B2C):  Sorts by age, gender, socioeconomic status or education for B2C companies.
• Lifecycle segmentation (B2C): Realizing consumers need different products at different stages of life (teens, young singles, married couples, families with kids, empty nesters, active retirees, frail elderly and more).
• Specialty segmentation (Mostly B2C):  Targets a narrowly defined “very niche” market (i.e. 35 year old male owners of classic Mustangs)
• Geographic segmentation (B2C or B2B):  Targets areas as small as a neighborhood or zip code or as broad as a country or continent.
• Vertical Industry segmentation (B2B):  Targets all elements within a defined industry as a B2B strategy.
• Job segmentation (B2B):  Identifies different decisions makers (such as engineers, purchasing agents, and managers) at specific points of the B2B sales cycle.

Recommendation: Focus on one market segment at a time, gain market share and profits and then invest in the next market segment.  Otherwise, your limited marketing time and advertising funds are spread too thin to have a significant impact.