Tips for choosing a specific market segment

Every type of business requires you to market a product or service to a desired market segment. Whether you are a Mary Kay saleswoman selling skin care products and makeup to women of all ages, an insurance broker targeting retirees, or a hypno-therapist offering hypnosis as a solution to various maladies, you still have to market your product. But choosing a specific market segment to market your product or service to can be a bit tricky. So here are some tips for choosing a specific market segment.

First, here are some reasons why you should choose a specific market segment for your business.
1. To make an increased profit with less marketing effort.
2. To quickly build your company's visibility and credibility
3. To reduce or eliminate possible competition
4. To create experts in your market segment more quickly
5. To leverage all your marketing into expanded income streams
Now, if you think those five points sound like something you'd like to happen to your business you might want to keep reading and learn a few tips.

Before you go any further in your marketing plan, you need to take a step back and really examine what it is you're trying to market. What kind of product or service is it? Do people need it? Will it fill a niche in a market? Is it a desirable product? Is it unique? In what ways will your product or service make people's lives easier, more interesting, entertaining, or fun? Who will benefit most from my product or service? Is there any particular group that may be opposed to my product or service?

Take a piece of paper and write down the answers to these questions (and any others that you may come up with). Doing this will help you begin to choose your specific market segment. For example, if you're marketing fancy wheels for sports cars, your target market will probably exclude anyone under the age of 16 and perhaps housewives. Or if you're marketing risqué lingerie and sex toys, you should probably not include those of very conservative Christian demographics, teenagers and younger, or those over 65.

Once you've narrowed down who you think your specific market segment might be, it's time to go out and test your hypothesis. Create a survey or send out samples of your products to your potential market segment. You should also send a handful of your products to those who may be outside of your market segment, but could be a possibility. Be sure to define people in terms of age, gender, race, ethnicity, geographic location, religion, marital status, language, stage of life, education, and profession.

When your results of your research are completed, you can now analyze them and determine who the optimum specific market segment of the population is. You may find that a group you thought was within your target group is actually not, and vice versa. This is the type of thing that is very useful to find out before you actually start marketing.

For example, you wouldn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a TV advertisement during day time television if your target market is middle-aged men (since a high percentage of day-time television viewers are made up of middle-aged women). In the process of your research, you should also determine what the best methods of advertisement are for that group. A target group of children would require brightly colored, interactive marketing strategies, whereas a target group of old men may be as simple as a written advertisement.

Basically, it all comes down to planning. If you plan ahead, you'll find that choosing your specific market segment can be easy as pie.

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