From Market Segmentation to Customer Segmentation: Opportunities for Competitive Advantage and Growth, Part 2
This week in the second installment of this multipart series on strategies and tactics to help multiple channel marketers increase competitive advantage and growth, I examine product positioning, consumers’ life cycles and buying preferences, and customer segmentation.
(For part 1, click here.)
Product positioning. How you position products contributes to your company’s growth and can leverage your competitive advantage. Emphasizing a brand’s points of difference makes possible differentiating products, and positioning based on different needs results in more relevant communications.
Multichannel marketing. Multichannel marketing improves customer acquisition, sales and profitability. The keys to doing this well include messaging and timing synergy, leveraging channels for different communications objectives, and tailoring product and pricing across channels.
From my experience, I've found that products, messaging, packaging and pricing should all be tailored to individual customers since you're reaching different markets with different preferences and price sensitivities.
Buying cycle stages. To increase competitive advantage, find ways to better understand where prospective customers are in the buying process. Then target them more relevantly. By better meeting customers’ needs, you can generate traffic more cost effectively and increase sales conversions.
With the continued increased usage of the internet for research, comparison shopping and purchasing, targeting based on the decision-making process now is used by companies selling through one-step direct sales processes, not only multistep marketers.
Multistep marketers’ search engine marketing efforts target consumers based on where they are in the buying process. Their landing pages should address consumers' specific needs.
Shopping preferences. Targeting based on shopping behavior represents another opportunity to increase competitive advantage and growth. The thinking here is that people who purchase the same product often purchase for different reasons and make purchases differently.
Consider the portals developed at the toy manufacturer Hasbro. These are based on understanding how different consumers shop across brands. That information then is used to market to them more effectively. At Ancestry.com, e-commerce sales conversions increased more than 100 percent by providing user experiences for two different consumer segments.
Customer segmentation. Given the current economic conditions and the prevalence of e-commerce, this strategy is more widely used now than ever. As catalogers and other direct marketers have known for years, customer segmentation makes it possible to increase sales, customer retention and profitability quickly.
The best segmentation practices start with needs/motivations, then overlay lifetime value, segment by where customers are in their life cycles and finally model based on RFM.
In the next article in this series, I’ll dive deeper into tactics and examples to help you increase competitive advantage and growth.
Paul Becker is a marketing consultant. Reach him at (702) 587-9011 or themarketerpaul@yahoo.com.
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