Page 34 - Duct Tape Marketing

18 Part I: Getting Started in Marketing

Anatomy of a Customer

An important part of knowing your customer is differentiating who’s who
among your clientele. It’s called market segmentation — the process of break-
ing your customers down into segments that share distinct similarities.

Here are some common market segmentation terms and what they mean:

ߜ Geographics: Segmenting customers by regions, counties, states, coun-
tries, ZIP codes, and census tracts.

ߜ Demographics: Segmenting customers into groups based on aspects
such as age, sex, race, religion, education, marital status, income, and
household size.

ߜ Psychographics: Segmenting customers by lifestyle characteristics,
behavioral patterns, beliefs, values, and attitudes about themselves,
their families, and society.

ߜ Geodemographics: A combination of geographics, demographics, and
psychographics. Geodemographics, also called cluster marketing or
lifestyle marketing, is based on the age-old idea that birds of a feather
flock together — that people who live in the same area tend to have sim-
ilar backgrounds and consuming patterns. Geodemographics helps you
to target your marketing efforts by pinpointing neighborhoods or geo-
graphic areas where residents share the age, income, lifestyle character-
istics, and buying patterns of your prospective customers.

Collecting information about your customer

People with the profile of your current customers are apt to become customers
as well. That’s why target marketing starts with customer knowledge. By know-
ing everything you possibly can about the person who currently buys from
your business, you can direct your marketing efforts toward others who match
that same profile.

Do-it-yourself fact-finding

You can get a good start on conducting customer research without ever walk-
ing out the front door of your business.

ߜ Collect addresses from shipping labels and invoices and group them
into areas of geographic concentration. For example, you can group
customers into those living within a certain number of miles of your busi-
ness, customers living within various regions of your state and within
neighboring states, customers living in other countries, and so on.

ߜ Follow the data trail from credit card transactions to see where
customers live.