If you’re marketing to all of your potential customers with the same message, you’re likely losing sales. Such a broad message doesn’t make the reader feel that you’re speaking directly to them. Without that personal touch, they will likely lose interest before making a purchase. After all, most business managers receive scores of marketing messages daily. To be effective, you need to dig deeper into how far along your targets are in reaching a specific goal that relates to your product or service. That’s why good market segmentation is essential.
What is Market Segmentation?
Market segmentation can be done in many ways. They all require sorting your prospect list by specific categories that matter to you. For example, if your product has regional licensing you wouldn’t send the same message to a prospect who is in another geographic area where you cannot sell it. Equally important is how your product or service is going to help the prospect solve a problem. If you are selling software, one company may have many users and another only a single user. The messaging will be different based on the volume of the sale. The same type of segmentation is needed for multiple products. It would be great if one message worked for all your clients, but odds are it won’t. The sooner you embrace segmentation early in your lead generation, the stickier your list will be.
The Importance of Personalization in Marketing Campaigns
The danger of creating a single, “throw everything at the wall” marketing campaign is that while such a campaign may initially gather leads, those leads are less likely to stay with your campaign through to making a purchase. They are also more likely to unsubscribe somewhere in the sales cycle because they don’t feel that your marketing messages are speaking to their specific needs. A generic marketing campaign that at first seems to be a good use of your limited funds might suddenly become very expensive when you figure the cost per conversion.
How do you get the information you need to micro-target your prospects and address your marketing messages to their specific needs? One good way is to use objections and questions received during sales calls and live chat as well as the comments readers leave on your social media posts. What are they asking for? What problems are they having with their business? Do you offer a product or service that can meet that need? Do you perhaps have a product gap that your competitors are offering? Listen to what your customers and prospective customers are telling you and devise a series of marketing messages each for a handful, not just a single, need.
Marketing campaigns are the fuel you need to keep your leads coming in. Without a consistent plan, leads dry up. At the Pollock Marketing Group, we’re here to help. We understand the importance of market segmentation and we can work with you to prepare and execute a complete marketing plan, one that includes marketing campaigns for each of your market segments.