Rob Bell's Notes from a Yorkshire Internet Megalomaniac

Summary

Segmentation is a marketing method that leads to better understanding of groups of customers and their motivations by separating them into meaningful groups.

What Is Segmentation?

Segmentation is a marketing process that divides customers and prospects into groups based on factors such as age, location, interests, social grouping, and wealth.

Why do we need Segmentation?

Once upon a time, marketing was much simpler – a one size fits all approach to promotion could be effective in a market with limited competition. As competition increased, and more sophisticated consumers arose, marketers began to recognise that products sold better if the promotions targeted a specific group of potential customers – a segment, in other words – who were most likely to buy the product.

How Can You Apply Segmentation to Your Business?

If you’re an established business, you already have customers who’ve bought from you. Do you know anything about them? You can probably infer what gender they are from their name, and where they live from their shipping address. You can now segment your customers by gender or location in that case.

Who buys more of your products – men or women? Can you find out their age? A customer questionnaire could help you find out more about them. If you know which ages and gender purchase most of your product, you can alter your promotions to appeal to these historically best segments of your potential customers.

Why Bother With Segmentation?

Modern customers have individualised and sophisticated tastes. People have different priorities at different stages in their life. If you try to appeal to everybody, you might appeal to nobody.

Segmentation allows you to discover the type of person who is likely to buy from you the most, and the motivations that drive them. by applying segmentation to your business, you will begin to understand your business in a greater level as you see that all customers are not the same.

Segmentation and Targeting

Once you have performed segmentation, you can target specific segments more accurately, with text and images that appeal to people in that segment.

For example, if you were a sweet maker, you could target one promotion at kids who eat them, and another at grandparents who like to buy sweets for their grandchildren. You would promote features like taste and appearance to the kids. With the grandparents, you would promote how happy the sweet makes kids, and how much more they would love you for giving them this specific sweet.

By creating messages that are designed to appeal specifically to the different groups, you will engage them more deeply – increasing the chances they will buy from you. Successful companies understand that to sell to a customer, you must understand them and their needs. Different markets, and the different types of customer within those markets, require tailored approaches specific to each one, if they are to achieve maximum success. They spend time and money trying to find out more about their customers, through questionnaires, focus groups and data mining. This allows them to more closely meet the needs of their market, which leads to higher revenues, as more people identify with, and purchase, the product.

Marketing is not Promotion People – Get that in Your Heads.

Promotion and Advertising are tools used within a Marketing programme when a product or service is ready to be launched. There’s lots of marketing needs to be done before that stage  though.

There are so many people around claiming to be marketing experts because they’ve undertaken promotional actions to some degree of success – that doesn’t make you a marketing guru that makes you a promotions guru.

Marketing is much more than just promoting products – it’s researching markets, identifying opportunities and problems, developing services and products to solve those problems in a manner a customer would like  setting up and testing Marketing campaigns, using above the line-, below the line- and digital- methods to formulate, execute and analyse the success of each actitivy, something that is particularly easy online given the availability of data, constantly testing and refining promotions as needed. And eventually, the product is ready to go, hopefuly with a well-armed knowledge of the new market that will allow him or her to dominate.

Market Research

A true Marketer knows that any product needs research prior to committing, here are just 15:

1. What’s the size of the market?
2. Who are the major players?
3. How competitive is it?
4. Have you done any Keyword Research?
5. What’s the customer profile?
6. What are people in the market desperate for?
7. Are there any problems there you can solve through your product or service?
8. Are you asking people in the market if they see a place for your product?
9. Would they buy it or try it out and give it a mark out of 100 for you??
10. Are you doing usability studies?
11. What’s the best way to reach your target consumers? It’s not always going to be online, many niches can found away from the computer.
12. What are the best factors to identify in order to do competitive analysis? Price, Features, Quality, Exclusivity – they’ll be different  for each market
13. Does your product represent what you want to sell to them, or what they want to buy from you?
14. How could you change the former into the latter?
15. Where can your potential customers be found?

Next time, I’ll look at competitive positioning and discuss how understanding a fairly simple topic to grasp can help you know more about your market than most others

This post is a direct copy of a page I just uploaded to my personal website, Rob-Bell.com – so the bit about ‘coming soon’ applies to that site, not this I thought the page worth sharing with you, my dear blog readers, so here it is, in all its’ glory including what I now consider to be quite an embarrassing video from a couple of years ago!

Beware the Newbie Trap – Watch That Wallet!

After 4 years of being disabled, I no longer had any savings and found myself living hand to mouth on incapacity and disability benefit, unable to afford to do much, rotting away quietly at home. Some days I couldn’t even afford to eat – but once I caught the internet marketing bug, I found myself forgoing meals to invest in courses I’d been recommended… as a Newbie (Complete Beginner) I didn’t know what was good or not, and I bought quite a few courses that were no use other than taking up space on my hard drive. I’m lucky that I have a degree in Business Management and Marketing, so already knew the rules, many tricks of the trade, and had a good eye for spotting what can only described as BS! I bet you’re just like me – you want to fill that knowledge gap, but you’re just not buying the right stuff…

If you’re new to making money online, it’s really easy to get sucked into spending lots of money on courses far too complex for the new or faint-hearted, which leave you frustrated, skint and feeling overwhelmed – resulting in an early exit before your new activities come to fruition.

The gurus all tell you to spend all your money on their course – which is always the best and fastest way for you to get millions, a massive house, a brand-new shiny Ferrari in your garage, and your own private jet to fly to your own private Island!

You and me both know that the only things that can really give you the lifestyle you dream of are free – Determination, Focus, and Effort.

If you’re just getting started and you’ve never done any marketing before, what you need is a way of learning the principles so you can build a long-term business that provides for you and your family for years to come. The best way of doing this generally is not to buy a thousand dollar web-based program and then convince others to buy the same program to make some money.

Some people are good at this, but most are not which is why network marketing and internet marketing have such high failure rates – I read it’s something like 97% of people who fail in these markets, probably because they find out the truth, which is:-

Even though you were told you would get rich quickly and easily by simply buying these programs, the truth is they will not make you rich on their own. Unless you are good at promotion, sales, and forming relationships with potential buyers, chances are you will struggle until you begin to understand better ways of marketing and promoting your cause. Your first sale is perhaps the hardest, especially if you don’t know how. I have a degree in marketing, but I still struggled at first, so I know and feel your pain, believe me!

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You would be far better off to join a low cost, even free, programme where you’re given the right training to get you started properly – where a community of your peers and experts come together to help each other learn the right techniques to generate a full-time income online. I joined Affiliate Funnel for those reasons, and 2 years on I’m still a member – and always recommend the program to friends and business contacts who want to learn about Internet Marketing, without spending their hard-earned money.

You can join and use Affiliate Funnel for free, or there’s a paid option which I have that costs me £4 ($6) each month -it’s easily worth every penny, although I don’t pay myself anymore – the program more than pays for itself every month.

Things don’t have to be complicated – anyone can generate income online, at whatever age. Several highly successful online business people are in their teens, and many are way past retirement age – the Internet shows no favours to any age. People of all skill levels and abilities just like you are able to find a system that’s right for them, and launch their new online career. No matter what you are doing now, you can start to earn money online – a lot of people I know never studied a day’s marketing in their lives before they took up internet marketing, and started applying it to their businesses and personal money-making ventures.

I’m teaching my Mum, who’s in her late 60s how to achieve stuff online, and have already taught a 71 year old who now writes and publishes a website with hundreds of, maybe even a thousand, pages about ancient history, numerology, and ancient wisdoms. It also features a selection of his artwork – the Sunday Times called him the ‘greatest Surrealist since Salvador Dali’.

Affiliate Funnel Will Get You Started, Quickly and Easily

My personal recommendation for this first stage of your online business career is Affiliate Funnel. It’s easy to get started, and the regular training will provide you with the essential information you need during this first stage. Affiliate Funnel helps you develop your online brand and begin to generate money from the Internet, and you don’t need to have sold or marketed or been a business whiz before.

You can ask questions of experts at the weekly saturday and monday night (and often other nights too) seminars, and they often give away industry secrets that will help you increase your income.

Give Affiliate Funnel a try-out today – it doesn’t cost you anything to join, and it could make you a lot of money.

Traffic Exchanges – The Easiest Way for You to Get People to View Your Offers

Traffic Exchanges are one of the easiest ways for newbie Internet Marketers to start to generate visitors to their websites, product pages and affiliate offers. They work on a simple basis – you earn credits by viewing other marketers pages, which you then use to get your own pages seen. So all you have to be able to do is look at a screen and click on a mouse – simples!

I still use Traffic Exchanges as one of the best sources of signups to my email lists, by providing quality materials in return for a name and email address – this is called permission-based marketing, and makes sure you’re never accused of spam, because every person on your list requested to be there, then confirmed this desire by clicking the confirmation link your autoresponder sends them when they sign up.

The reason I still use Traffic Exchanges two years later? Easy – most of my subscribers come from them.

You get laser targeted access to Internet Marketers – everyone there is one, so you know who you’re talking to, and what motivates them. They are also the simplest promotion method online – once you have a page to promote, you just click other sites to get people to view yours. Don’t tell anyone, but I often surf traffic exchanges while I’m watching TV or listening to a Webinar or watching an online video… the hours can fly by and you find yourself with thousands of credits to spend!

I use Traffic Splash, Dragon Surf, I Love Hits and SWAT as my main traffic exchanges, although I sometimes use others. SWAT in particular is good because they also provide private weekly training where big hitters teach you the things that enabled them to become big hitters in the first place.

Here’s a video I did a couple of years ago showing you how to use a traffic exchange, the link doesn’t work anymore (don’t try going to jointrafficsplash.info, it doesn’t work anymore – I didn’t keep the domain name!) To visit Traffic Splash <—- simply click on this name.

Coming Soon

I’ll be building up this section of the site over the next few months, when I get time between client jobs. I aim to provide information and resources to help individuals and businesses build successful brands and revenues online. Ironically, because I can only do it between client jobs, the more successful I become the longer this will take to build, so you really should be hoping for my failure… Although if I were to fail, why would you want to learn from me?!?!? Aaaah blessed irony!

If you want to receive my daily email series, 35 Free Websites, Applications and Tools to Help You Make Money Online, sign up here now – I’ll throw in a free copy of a book that can help you get started online when you confirm the confirmation email you’ll receive when you sign up. If it doesn’t arrive in under 2 minutes, check your spam folder – sometimes Gmail and Yahoo are overzealous in their filtering – heck the other day my Mum sent me an email and they spam foldered that!

Here’s to your success,

Rob