As an internet marketer how do you create blogs, Facebook Fan Pages, and Tweets to target the specific market that you sell your product or service to? Connecting to these and thus to your potential clients is what marketers call inbound marketing. You could use demographics or psychographics as ways to connect more directly with the specific clients. The drawback of demographics is that it gives too narrow an amount of information. Psychographics comes with a price for the software. So how can a small business create the right target?
There is a third way to look at people that combines both demographics and psychographics and creates a bit wider group, but in ways that can be useful without being expensive. One of the names of this path is segment marketing or segmenting. In previous blogs we called it cohort marketing, but that is an unusual term. Let’s just use segmenting instead.
How is a segment defined?
- Members of a marketing segment of people are in the same age group who are likely to have had similar experiences during their formative years which range from late adolescence to early adulthood (from around 17 to 23).
- The experiences they have in common are called defining moments and these moments influence attitudes, preferences, values and buying behaviors. These behaviors tend to stay with the group throughout their entire lives.
No wonder this is a relatively easy way to target your market. You can use this information to create communications to resonate with the segment’s core values on an emotional level or plan how your marketing might be different depending on which target you want to reach. Not all marketers need to look at their potential clients this way, but it is a handy tool for selling food, music, cars, financial services, insurance, and special caregiving services.
Let’s look at the segment called Millennials, born between 1980 and 2000. This group is sometimes called Generation Y, Nexters, Generation Next.
Some markers of these people are:
- Technology/menu driven
- Racially/ethnically diverse (1 out of 3 is a person of color)
- Pressured to excel academically
- No recollection of the Reagan era or the Cold War
- The world has always had computers, AIDS, answering machines and microwave ovens
In the April 5, 2012 blog newswise.com comes this article: “Marketing Researchers See New Generational Cohort Emerging” in which University of Massachusetts Amherst professor of marketing Charles D. Schewe and his team state that there is a split in the original Millennials and a younger set.
What Dr. Schewe and his team found was that the values most strongly differentiating the younger and older Millennials were “piety” and “thrift”. The older group’s defining moment can be traced back to the wide-scale advent of the Internet in 1995. The younger group has reacted to the severe economic downturn with a desire to enjoy life and make the most of it.
If you look at the splintered group of the Millennials, it becomes easier to understand why social scientists are now saying that there are two different groups of Baby Boomers.
The important idea here is that you need to look at your product or service and decide who you want to market to. Then spend some time learning about these different marketing segments and look at how other businesses are targeting your group.
What segments are you targeting?
For more information:
- Cohort Marketing—The Next Phase of Target Marketing –BroadVision Marketing Blog, June 6, 2012
- Target Market – What and Who? -BroadVision Marketing Blog, June 4, 2012
Jaco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.
Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook - www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing - and LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.