As a business, you can’t be all things to all people. With market segmentation, you can divide and conquer (so to speak) to own your specific share of the market. To do this, you divide the market into subsets of people with certain characteristics, interests and/or needs in common. From these groups of people, you can complete your segmentation by selecting your target market segment. If you’re thinking about starting a business, segmentation can help you determine how big your target market is and whether your services will be desirable.

To effectively grow your business, without becoming mired in a time sink, your content marketing effort must be guided by a clear strategy. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily rush to create new content and maintain a presence on all social media. Instead, be purposeful. Think focused rather than frantic. Make sure each piece of content is effective, leading to your conversion goals rather than going for quantity and achieving little. Feed the right, high-quality content to your prospects at key points in the sales cycle and you can lead them through to the services agreement. Create content answering objections that each client persona typically has at specific decision points in the sales-nurturing process. Your content should:

Most professional services firms have an email list--and they don’t do much with it. A lot of times these firms send out general interest newsletters or keep in sporadic touch with industry touch points and companies on the list. There’s a lot more gold to be mined in those email addresses that your firm has been accumulating. Email marketing is a powerful tool to gather information and help deepen relationships. 

In today’s wired world, electronic communications are rarely extraordinary. Everyday is filled with emails, text messages, tweets, likes and follows that typically fulfill some utilitarian purpose. These messages are quick, taking minutes to draft, and rarely involve thoughtfully written prose.  One could easily say, “This is simply the natural evolution of communication.”  While that may be the case, I am not totally convinced. 

Valentines Day is the perfect day to offer a heartfelt message about winning the hearts and minds of clients.  On this special day, I prepared a light-hearted post as a way to express to readers how much I care. 

Do you send out regular email communications?  Have you ever been motivated to roll out a market segmentation effort to be more effective in your firm's message?  Segmentation aims to classify groups within your contact database to deliver content that appeals to specific group interests.  This article discusses how market segmentation should be a part of every inbound marketing strategy.