In their ground breaking 1993 book, The One to One Future, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers were the first marketing theorists to stress the importance of extreme segmentation and personalization in successful marketing-essentially making a unique offering of a product or service to each prospect and customer. They stressed that marketers needed to understand the customer’s point of view, behaviors, and perceptions and use that knowledge as the foundation for marketing communication.
Market segmentation is the study and categorization of target audiences into subgroups of individuals or organizations sharing one or more characteristics, beliefs or values that cause them to have similar needs and expectations, and require a unique communications approach. A true market segment meets all of the following criteria:
We now have the means and the expertise to dynamically align unlimited market segments to a pre-populated platform of resources poised to deploy in real-time across different marketing channels in which content, media selection, and timing are all determined by if/then algorithms triggered by the individual prospect. That’s a mouthful.
What this means is that we can automatically create ultra-high relevancy, not simply for one group of your customers or prospects, but for multiple segments, and on an individual, one to one basis without disrupting the core brand positioning.
Microsoft, an outfit that knows something about market share, targets business users, home users and IT professionals, segmenting each of these areas by type. They further segment their business user audience by scale, from small and mid-size companies to enterprise organizations. Microsoft also segments by industry, including: education, financial services, government, retail and eight other industry focuses. Several of these are sub-segmented as well, such as education, which addresses K-12 audiences and higher education audiences separately. Where would Microsoft be if they only focused on one of these many audiences? Obviously, just a fraction of the company they are today.
We can help you deploy dynamic 1 to 1 marketing campaigns using state-of-the-art data segmentation. You’ll be the hero and your organization’s profits will soar.