Learning Market Segmentation

Learning market segmentation is the key to marketing success. The content on this page will help you learn about ways to use market segmentation to improve your business results.

Market segmentation is the process of dividing markets into potential customers who have similar needs, interests, and characteristics and show similar purchasing characteristics.

Why is learning market segmentation important?

Segmentation is both a science and an art. You can learn a lot by reading books and studying websites. But perhaps the best way to learn market segmentation is listening to people who are in the market. And this in not your customers, but people who are not your customers.

Segmentation efforts must be managed. It is not possible for you to pursue every segment within your market. The key is to do the work so that when you learn market segmentation for your specific market, you know where to put your resources.

Market Segmentation is an action-oriented process

There are two basic strategic choices for segmentation: One: to segment the market. Two: Treat everyone in the market as a potential customer.

Option one requires that you do the work necessary to determine segments within your market, The second option, while seemingly larger with more opportunity, rarely yields success.

How do you go about learning market segmentation?

Practical experience in a market is often the best way to think about initial segments you might target. There are some excellent books that will help you if you want to go deeper: “Market Segmentation: How to do it and how to profit from it,” by McDonald and Dunbar; and a highly theoretical book called, “the Handbook of Market Segmentation: Strategic Targeting for Business and Technology firms,” by Art Weinstein. You may get book one on Amazon here and book two on Amazon here (Affiliate Link)

You can make learning market segmentation easy by engaging with this site

Market segmentation is one of those activities that often gets pushed to “another day.” And yet if more people took the time to drill down into what the potential customers in a market want, they might find unexpected success.

And market segmentation isn’t just for marketing people. I wrote a blog post about why sales reps need market segmentation, too.