Market Segmentation & Niche Marketing

Every company or small / home business exists for the purpose of providing their product or service to the market place. With this point in mind it is sometimes baffling not to mention amazing that a great deal of businesses do not spend time on market segmentation (or niche marketing and we will use the terms interchangeably) as a regular part of their business strategy planning sessions.

Company's often ask about how to do market segmentation and some of the many answers to that question will be addressed here. Failure to focus on implementations of market segmentation essentially means that the given business may well end up selling their product or service into a section of the market place which is not as good as a fit as it could or should be.

The company's which command significant market shares are the ones which make sure their products or services are carefully targeted to a specific niche in the market. Let's consider car manufacturers who wish to sell a sports car with two seats and costs in excess of $60K.

This should get you thinking, so consider this if you were tasked with selling this type of car who would you target ? would you spend thousands of dollars sending out leaflets and information to young mothers whose children are all at school ? Would you go to college campuses to speak to post graduate students about buying their first car ? or how about going to visit local working men's clubs ?

As we continue to consider finding an appropriate fit within the market for our product or service consider the latest video game which has entered the market.

If you were tasked with making maximum sales of this product in a given period of time what groups of individuals would you get together into a room to talk about the product in order to effect the most of amount of sales. Would you call up the local church and ask the pastor for permission to address the congregation after the next prayer meeting ? Of course you would not but you may well take a similar approach if you were representing a music production company who were promoting one of the hottest christian artists on the scene.

When considering market segmentation we have to stand from the company's point of view and we look out from the company and view the landscape which is called the market. In essence we are looking out at the sea of the population all of which may be clients of ours. Here follows a process on how to effectively segment your market.

Niche marketing looks at splitting up the target market into group for which you can use to target your product and service to. The market can be segmented by race, age, earning capacity, living area, marital status, disposable income, height, skin color, parents, single parent families, music lovers etc, etc which when devised correctly will give you a firm base for which category of product you can sell to a particular Market Segment.

In the examples above let's consider music lovers; straight away we know that within this market segment or niche there can be jazz, classical, opera, rap, r&b, latin and the list can go on.

What is the point here ? the point is that section or niches in the market can be further segmented to determine very vertical or narrowly defined sections of the market place. When we carefully segment the market to various degrees we end up with the situation where our product dovetails into a section of the market perfectly and all of our marketing and advertising activities and budgets are seen to work in a most efficient manner.

In summary, there are various components which make up a marketing strategy, segmentation strategies play a major part in the overall marketing strategy of any organization or small business. Using the examples above and using it as a template for your niche marketing exercise will serve your company well.

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