How to segment your customers to determine your marketing needs

What does it mean, to segment your customers? When you segment something you divide it into segments, or parts, usually for organizational purposes. When segmenting customers for marketing purposes, then, we're putting our customers into helpful clusters or groups in order to develop a better marketing approach, and in turn a better product and better customer service. Let's consider a few things about segmenting customer in order to determine marketing needs.

1. In today's world, the thought of putting people into groups, labeling them, etc., gives us legitimate shivers, but it makes sense when you think of doing it to better provide specific people's specific needs. Hospitals, schools, churches, and so forth or organized in such a way that different people fall into different categories requiring different kinds of service, and if the case were otherwise nobody would get the service they required. Segmenting customers for marketing purposes is the same thing.
2. This is just a little, simple article, so let's take just a little, simple approach. Let's segment our customers into two groups-old customers and new customers. That seems easy enough to do, right? Well, it is and it isn't. Who's old and who's new? In the first stages of any marketing procedure, our approach can be somewhat arbitrary in order to get us going. Let's say that any customer who's been with us longer than one year is an old customer, and that any customer who's been with us less than one year is a new customer. Already we're on our way, we've begun to segment our customers to determine our marketing needs.
3. But how does segmenting our customers into old and new help us to determine our marketing needs? Now, indeed, we come to the heart of the matter. Segmenting our customers into hold and new helps us to determine our customers' needs, and there you have the answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question. When we determine our marketing needs, we determine our customers' needs simultaneously. After all, a new customer has different needs than an old customer. When we segment new customers from old customers, it helps us to hone in on what each category stands in need of.
4. Let's keep going. We've segmented our customers into old and new to help us determine our marketing needs-or, in other words, to help us determine our customers' needs. A key part of marketing is getting customer feedback. If a company can get good customer feed back, and what's more, respond in a good (that is, a prompt, thoughtful, and effective) manner, they're well on the road to success. But feedback from older customers is going to be different in kind from newer customers. Feedback from older customers will help us provide a better experience for our newer customers, and feedback from our newer customers will help us provide a better experience for our customers to come. It moves in a circle, a big, positive circle.
5. Even this little, simple example teaches us much about segmenting our customers in order to determine marketing needs. Customers can, and should, be segmented into more diverse categories than merely old and new. The more diversely we can segment our customers, the more diversely we can enrich their experience, and our experience, with the business we provide. A diverse marketing approach is a healthy, flourishing marketing approach. Start simply, and segmenting your customers in order to determine your marketing needs will be the first step on the road to a thriving company (in other words, thriving customers).