Paul DiModica

When working with clients, we often help identify new business market gaps to launch into as well as existing markets to exploit using a segmentation model based on multiple variables including, but not limited to, the client's core competence, competitive position, corporate financial capabilities, market demand, business assets, and risk tolerance.

• Are looking to open a new office in another city?

• Should you sell overseas?

• Will prospects in London, Las Vegas and Chicago buy your offering based on the same marketing characteristics?

• Should you increase your offering's price?

• Should I set up a channel partner program to expand?

These are all relevant business growth questions that CEO's ask on a regular basis. Segmentation marketing is one key business driver to understand how to maximize top line revenue growth.

Provided to Paul DiModica by eMarketer.com under contract.

To answer these questions correctly, management teams must understand the basis for business growth.

Two types of segmentation marketing methods are:

1. Geo-marketing segmentation
2. Spatial marketing segmentation

Geo-Marketing Segmentation

When building your business growth plan, there are different marketing propositions that must be developed for the geography that you market to. Prospects are not rigid, stone-like clones of each other. They have unique value identification demands based on the geography they live in. Prospects in London, Tokyo, Boston, Chicago and LA all have different drivers that make them acquire. Do southern people in the U.S. buy different from people in the midwest?

Geo-marketing is the subsegmenting of these unique buyer variables around the traditional 4 P's of marketing -- Price, Promotion, Position and Product.

Geo-marketing can:

• Subsegment for you geographic opportunities within larger geographies (Atlanta within Georgia)
• Help identify new markets to enter
• Refine sales and marketing budget allocation
• Personalize your marketing messages

Spatial Marketing Segmentation

Spatial marketing goes even further than geo-marketing by helping you analyze not just the geography of where your targeted prospects live, but also the intersection of buyer value based on your offering's distribution capabilities, competitors, buyer lifestyle, communication capabilities, buyer financing capabilities and even weather, all within the same buying zones. When creating your value forward marketing programs, remember to build value uniquely, not globally, based on the spatial buying characteristics of the prospect you are trying to sell (i.e., well-to-do retiree buyers in a waterfront community may perceive value for the same offering differently than prospects who live in a midwest farming community).

Spatial marketing can help you:

• Forecast demand
• Profile your customers
• Minimize marketing investment mistakes
• Increase customer satisfaction levels by understanding the demographic flow of complaints (who complains and why)

Use spatial and geo-marketing segmentation methods as business tools to increase the return on investment of your marketing programs and as a foundation to make premeditated business decisions based on logic, not emotion.

“If you want to be a big company tomorrow, you have to invest and start acting like one today.” -- Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Founder IBM

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