Market Your Business without Breaking the Bank - Series One

As many of you know I recently did a talk at the Womens' Business Center Breakfast Table entitled Marketing without Breaking the Bank. I'll be discussing some of the information I presented in Series of blog entries starting with this one.

Today, I'll discuss one strategy you can use in order to improve the way you market your business, but first I suggest reading these prior posts as other useful strategies:

Keeping the Energy Flowing

The Departure of Interacting Relationships

Now, back to the Series

One strategy to help you improve your marketing is by segmenting your customers. What this does is allow you to create better customization of the communication to them, allows you to improve your product offering to each segment, and it can open doors to new product ideas and trends that you may not have considered.

For example, lets say you send out a newsletter to your customer base and in that newsletter you highlight some general company news, a product or service offering and you give some insight into general industry news and how or why your company's offering relate to the news. If you segment your customer base you can send out the same general news, but you can focus the product or service offering specific to each segmented group.

If you have a group of patrons who have been with you for quite some time and have utilized your basic offerings and are now purchasing your high-end products to tell them about and introductory offer is of little to no value to them. So, in that newsletter you've missed an opportunity to let them know about another product or service that may better reflect their needs.

There are many ways to segment your customers, here is just a few:

1. Product - You can segment your database by your product offerings and who is purchasing each one.

2. Service - Similar to products, you can breakdown the list by your service offerings.

3. Demographics - If you sell nationally or globally you can break it down by territory.

4. Purchasing behaviors - You can segment your database by the purchasing behaviors of your customers whether it is by dollars, season, time, etc.

Segmentation requires some knowledge on how to effectively mine the information of your offerings and/or customers. It is a valuable strategy in often not used enough in small and mid-size businesses.