Market segmentation is a business exercise that chunks the total marketplace for a product into smaller segments, and pulls together groups of consumers with similar characteristics, needs and wants.  It enables the organisation to identify those parts of the market that they can best serve.

As a small business or start-up it can feel quite scary to segment and target only a portion of the market. After all, we need to generate as much business as we can right?  Right.  But let me tell you, it is more effective to dominate a larger share of a small market than a smaller share of a large market.  It's natural to worry about missing opportunities if you dismiss a portion of the market. But you can’t be all things to all people.  If you try to be, you could weaken your messaging and branding, and end up merely a ‘me too’ company.   

Beside the efficiency of it all, there are many other benefits to be had from segmenting the market.  Take a look at these:
Benefits of Segmentation and Targeting for Small Businesses

• Efficiency: it will be easier to craft communications and the marketing mix focusing purely on the needs of those customers in your target segment.
• Attraction: all your marketing techniques will be positioned to attract the right customer.
• Risk: strategic decisions on how to go to market will arise from detailed knowledge of the potential consumer.
• Strategy: your marketing activity will be commercially viable.  You will formulate better marketing objectives and strategies.
• Differentiation:  you will find it easier to differentiate your product from those of your competitors and design your unique selling proposition (USP).
• Focus: you will be able to tailor your offerings to the groups most likely to purchase them.
• Growth: you will see growth in both market share and business results.
• Profitability: superior profitability may result from successful market segmentation.

ExampleSo let me finish with an example.  Let's say we're a travel company.  Our primary market is the travel sector.  But the travel sector as a whole is way too broad to be workable as far as targeting is concerned.  So we need to segment a little further.  Let's say we come up with these segments:

• Young Adventurers age 20 - 35
• Families age 30 - 55
• Seniors aged 55 -75

So now we've segmented the market, it's time to identify our target market - the market we wish to service.  We can do this simply by calculating how attractive the market is (size, growth, competition) and mapping our ability, as a business, to compete in that market.  When you have that result - you have your target market.

There are some highly complex models you can use to map attractiveness and ability to compete (and I will be blogging about them soon) but for now, I would say make it simple and follow your hunches.

If you need any help with segmenting or targeting, please contact me.  Happy to help.

When you create a business, you bring forth an entity which has its own personality; a living thing.  A mission statement expresses the essence of that personality and its nature of being.  Defining your mission statement is not, therefore, an empty exercise.  Rather it captures and radiates the core purpose of the business and serves as the driving force in everything you do.

Apart from the overarching opening I've just presented, why else would you spend time crafting a mission statement?  The very act of thinking about your mission statement helps to clarify your business’s goals, standards, and values.  These, in turn, form the framework by which all interested parties know, understand and buy into your vision, and the foundation by which your company will flourish.

Of all the business planning elements, I believe this one provides the most direction. It pulls together disparate pieces and creates focus. Decision making becomes easy, as does strategy formulation.  Your marketing messages appear clear and consistent.  A strong mission invokes the company's public voice.  In other words, your communications and marketing materials speak in a way that reflects the character of every facet of your business. 

A mission statement can be as short as a couple of words or as long as a few sentences.  Make it vibrant. Make it mean something.  Use active verbs and the active voice but most of all, make it inspire action.  You want it to make a powerful impact.

Make your mission broad enough for expansion.  Let me explain this by example.  Take Starbucks; they could have had a mission: "To make the best coffee in the world".  It's a decent enough statement, but it is limiting.  See how their actual statement broadens the scope; "To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time."  Do you see the difference?  Without a doubt, Starbucks lives its mission, and the scope is wider than just coffee.

To get your thinking in gear, I have presented some questions.  Take a look, think about them and write your answer.  When you have finished, pick out the most important points and put together in one, two or three sentences.  And lastly, find out what other people think before you finalise it. 
 
ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS

• Why am I in this business - what made me want to do this?
• What do I do - define who you are, what you offer, and price, quality?
• How do I do it - how am I different to the competition?
• Who do I serve - persona?
• What image do I want to portray - how do I want my business to be perceived
• What value do I provide?
• What are the defining characteristics of my business - what philosophies or values guide me?
  

If you would like help with crafting an inspiring mission statement, contact me at:
allison@aj-marketing.co.uk
or phone: 0747 1158866

You may have come across the word "Persona" quite a bit lately.  It has become a modern business buzz word and possibly already overused.  However, a better exercise I've not found to help to identify a target market.

Essentially, a persona is a made-up character that represents a typical customer: an archetype if you will. It provides an in-depth character representation of a group and allows your marketing and messaging to flow, so you engage precisely with your target audience.  Whether B2B or B2C this exercise is relevant.  You don't market to an organisation; you market to an individual.  

You may create one, two, ten, twenty, any number depending on your type of business.  You would typically create one persona for each your target groups.  However, I suggest you start off with one or two; you can add more later.  

The exercise prompts you to capture the essence of the character. So use as much detail as you can, right down to where they typically shop. Seriously!  These personas are living, breathing archetypes, and you need to get to know them.

You may want to think as well about creating a negative persona.  These detail the characteristics of someone you do not want as a customer. And the point of the exercise is to sift the wheat from the chaff and concentrate funds and resources only on profitable customers. 

You can use a variety of methods to map out and create your personas.  Have a study of your customer database - what characteristics jump out?  Talk to a few of your clients and glean information from what they tell you.  Most importantly, use your gut feel - your intuition can reveal a lot. 

Finally, I've provided here a free template to guide you through the process.  You may find it beneficial to include a picture, a portrait of your perfect persona. Perhaps someone you know or a fictional character, an A lister maybe or a cartoon character.  The visual element adds weight and cements the personality in your mind.   

A copywriter is someone who produces writing (or copy) for advertising and marketing purposes.  It's a specialist form of writing that has developed over time and along with industry transformations. It is a genre that requires unique skills quite distinct from other writing styles. Copywriting is an essential piece of the marketing plan and works across the whole marketing mix.

Done well, copy adopts the role of a virtual sales person – it gets attention, fuels interest, incites desire and moves to action.

As a small business owner, you may want to write copy for yourself.  After all, you write well, right?  Bear in mind that we're not just talking about having a good handle on English here.  We're talking about producing compelling, quality wordsmithing that does the job of persuading the reader to do something: to sign up to a newsletter, to purchase something, to download a free eBook, comment, and more.
 
Professional copywriters know how to combine some specific elements to ensure the writing does the job it's supposed to, and that's sell.  I've highlighted the most important points to consider.  If you take these on board, you'll see a significant improvement in your commercial copy.

Aim To Generate Sales
The more information you can provide about a product or service, the more likely you are to make a deal. Customers tend to qualify themselves in this digital age.  They seek as much information as possible and look to satisfy their objections.  So your content needs to address all possible objections ahead of time – you're in effect handling objections in advance.  Well, thought out copy can build your brand, engage customers, and increases sales.

Persuade

You want to persuade your reader to do what you want them to do.  We're not talking about manipulation here where you coerce people to act.  No, persuasion is the skill of tapping into your readers' emotional drives and using these emotions to initiate a response.

The six primary emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise.  Write copy with these in mind.  Think about how your reader feels now about the problem and craft your copy to address how you want them to feel after they finish reading.

Highlight Benefits
When we talk about a product or service, we typically consider the features first and ignore the benefits.  For example, "A pencil with an eraser on the end of it".  The feature is the inbuilt eraser.  So what's the benefit?  Simply ask the question, "What does that do for the customer?" The answer provides the benefit.  And in this case, the eraser allows mistakes to be dealt with immediately, and that saves time. There are probably others you can think of, but you get the idea right? 

Write about the benefits to the customer rather than outlining features. 

Optimise Your Online Copy For Search Engines (SEO)
The digital landscape forces us to write with search engines mechanics in mind.  If you want people to find you, you must use the words and phrases that people search on when looking for your kind of product or offering.   By weaving these keywords and phrases into your web content, you make it easier for search engines, and thus, potential customers, to find you. 

Try these online SEO resources:
To identify keywords, use the free online planner tool by Google: https://adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner

To test your site for SEO effectiveness visit: 
http://seositecheckup.com/
 
Brand Presence
Keep your content in the style and voice that expresses your brand's personality and be consistent with your messaging.  If you're the sole writer, this should be easy.  If you use professional copywriters, make sure you brief them well on the essence of your brand and check that all deliverables portray the nature thereof. 

"Write The Way You Talk. Naturally" (David Ogilvy)
Counsel from David Ogilvy.  Write as if you were talking to a customer that's sat right in front of you.  It will serve you well and will influence simple, and clear writing that is appropriate for your audience.

It helps if you can envisage your perfect customer as you write.  In this case, think about creating a persona.  You can find out more about Personas and pick up a free template at Hubspot.  Personas are generalised representation of your perfect customer.  If you direct your writing to this model, you'll find you naturally cover the needs and wants of your general target audience.

The internet is now one of the most popular and necessary marketing tools, especially for small businesses. And this is quite understandable of course, given its reach and ‘always on’ availability.  And this is why more and more potential customers are turning to the Internet for researching and purchasing products and services. And as this trend continues to grow, you, Ms/Mr small business owner, must nail your online presence even more if you want to stay competitive.

Now, along with doing all the great internet marketing activities, we have to remember the fundamentals of marketing.  There are some basic marketing methodologies that stand the test of time and technology and must never be neglected.  I’m talking here about targeting!  You have to know your audience so well that you’re almost intimate - yes, intimate!  The more you know about the people you are trying to reach, the easier it will be to appeal to their heart and soul.

Before embarking on an online campaign, do some due diligence on this.  Research the market, profile your current customers and put together some personas; generalised characteristics of your best customer.  That is who you are targeting and that is who you want to speak to.

When you’re done, you’ll be in a great position to tailor all your marketing efforts with a focus on this customer.  I say ‘this customer’ because it’s a great idea to personify one person in your head, and your communications will be way more powerful.  You can use a number of variables to ensure your message is resonating with your target audience.  For example people consume information in different ways – some like to read the printed word, others like to watch a video, still others like to listen to a pod cast or get involved with a demo.  Be mindful of the big melting pot of media choices and test out different options.

Consider too the overall concept of your website.  If for example your website is designed to attract the attention of say the older generation with a more conservative outlook, you wouldn’t want to present a format that had outlandish, buzzing, flashing visuals using colloquial chatty street talk would you?  Moreover, you may not attract the young, streetwise crowd by presenting reliable, steady, conventional, controlled content.  These are extremes but you get the picture, right?  If you know the majority of your target audience is in the category of; young, married, two children, upwardly mobile, drives a reliable car rather than sporty, you design all your communications, including your website, around that profile.  You can rest assured then, that when that person visits your site, or consumes your information, he/she will feel totally at home.

See more on segmentation and targeting here

By AJ - Marketing on Demand for small businesses and medium sized businesses

 As a small business owner you will be more than aware that customer relationships are key to success.  The way you work and communicate with your customers can build long-lasting, meaningful relationships that turn clients into fans, and fans into clients. Here are eight proven and trusted ways to build lasting customer relationships.

1. Show Them That You Know Them

The more research you do into the needs and desires of your target audience, the more your audience will be able to tell that you’re interested in them. When you show interest in them, it will make them interested in your business and you. When you discover something about your audience, let them know through your content and your actions.

2. Treat Them Right

It’s so easy to focus sales and special events on acquiring new clients. But what about the clients we already have? Keeping them is far more important than getting a new client, and less costly too. Do something special for your existing client base or fan base that shows them that you care about them. Give them a discount, or a special freebie, or something else that attaches them to you in a special way.

3. Be Transparent and Honest

One way to endear yourself to your audience is to always be transparent and honest. If you make a mistake, own up to it. If you change your views on something, it’s okay to admit it. Doing so will endear you to your audience and make you appear so much more trustworthy to them.

4. Put People before Numbers

While you do things to help promote your business, it’s important to uphold your values and remember that people are more important than numbers. If you put people first in your business, including yourself, you’ll find that you naturally improve your bottom line. The more people trust you, the more they’ll buy from you.

5. Be Fun When Appropriate

No one wants to feel as if they’re communicating with a robot or someone who is not real. Be funny when it’s appropriate so that you can show your humanity. Your humanness will shine through when you add some humour and fun to posts, emails, and even sales pages.

6. Be Responsive

Your customers expect to get an answer when they have a problem, and they expect a speedy response.  Provide many different ways for your audience to contact you. Explain to your audience at each method how long they can expect to wait for a response. Then follow up and do what you said you’d do.

7. Engage with Your Audience

Find ways to engage with your audience. Ask for their advice or ideas when it comes to a new product or service you’re going to launch. They can help name it, help define what should be in it, and even how much you should charge for it. Your audience can also be your best source of word-of-mouth marketing.

8. Consider the Communication Format

Also, it’s important to try to get an understanding of how people communicate within their environment. Communication online in chat, instant message, Twitter, or a blog, is far different from communicating on the telephone or in person. Even email is different from other methods of communication. It’s imperative that you determine what is different and then make up for that with the type of communication they’re using.

Building customer relationships that last is part of the goal of marketing. When you’ve formed an attachment with the consumer, they will stick with you for years - through price increases, trials and tribulations, and more. 

So let me finish with an example.  Let's say we're a travel company.  Our primary market is the travel sector.  But the travel sector as a whole is way too broad to be workable as far as targeting is concerned.  So we need to segment a little further.  Let's say we come up with these segments:

• Young Adventurers age 20 - 35
• Families age 30 - 55
• Seniors aged 55 -75

So now we've segmented the market, it's time to identify our target market - the market we wish to service.  We can do this simply by calculating how attractive the market is (size, growth, competition) and mapping our ability, as a business, to compete in that market.  When you have that result - you have your target market.

There are some highly complex models you can use to map attractiveness and ability to compete (and I will be blogging about them soon) but for now, I would say make it simple and follow your hunches.

If you need any help with segmenting or targeting, please contact me.  Happy to help.

Top 11 Social Media Platforms

Businesses today have been thrown into the social arena whether they like it or not.  And now the once never heard of, SOCIAL strategy holds a critical position in business planning.   In the scheme of things, Social Media is still pretty new.  The young are already adept, and the older generations are on their way to mastery.   

And master it we must.  The bottom line whether we like it or not is if you want to compete, you must have a social presence.

Big firms, with bountiful resources, can manage this well.  But it's not so easy for small businesses who have to take a smarter and scaled down approach.  Primarily, small business owners need to be savvy about which social platforms to use.  In the realm of Social Media, it's easy to spread yourself thinly and to throw in buckets of cash. 

 Making my way around the SM the maze, I found this useful Infographic from the folks at Likeable.  It reviews the top 11 social media platforms and gives helpful information in a nut shell.  It’s a good foundational piece that will help you focus on the right solution for your business.  Check it out here.

What’s in a Twitter header? Hmm, I wonder how many of us in small business have considered that question. I know when I was setting up my Twitter site, the cover photo image was less important to me than showcasing my logo.   In fact, the image I chose as my cover photo was a cropped portion of my logo, with my focus here around ‘consistent branding’.

Now though it’s clear there’s more to a Twitter cover photo, or any social media cover photo for that matter, than meets the eye. In fact, it could be argued that it’s the most impactful part of the tool.  After all it occupies the primary position of the platform which is the seat of the ‘first impression’.  And how many seconds do we have to make a good first impression? Seven! Therefore your header should embody the overarching concept of your undertaking, you need it to reflect your ethos and then your customers will resonate with your story. A  well thought out image for your Twitter cover photo can talk in spades.

This HubSpot blog presents a number of good real-life examples of organisations doing it right.  You’ll find some examples abounding with energy while others more subtle, but they all have one thing in common, they all reflect the grassroots tale of why they exist.