Creation

In the Marketing Profile section of the Web Site Planning Form you need to define your target market(s). For each goal you select on
your Planning Form, decide who your audience is. Phrases such as “everyone
who eats chocolate” or “all airplane passengers” are way too broad. Unless
you are Toyota or General Mills, you won’t have the funds to reach everyone,
so you need to segment and prioritize your markets.
Note: I discuss how to fill out the rest of the Marketing Profile section in
“Writing Your Online Marketing Plan,” later in this chapter.

Market segmentation
Market segmentation (dividing your market into smaller sets of prospects who
share certain characteristics) takes many different forms. You need to select
the one that’s the best fit for your business. For your online marketing plan,
you need to locate the various sites on the Web where your target audiences
hang out, so you need to know who they are. Think about it for a moment. The
sites that appeal to opera lovers might not appeal to teenagers, and vice versa.
One caveat: Your online target audience might differ slightly from your offline
audience. It might be more geographically diverse, wealthier, older, younger,
more educated, more motivated by price than features, or vice versa. You
discover these variations only from experience.
Here are a few forms of market segmentation:
-- Demographic segmentation: Sorts by age, gender, socioeconomic
status, or education for B2C companies.
-- Lifecycle segmentation: Acknowledges that consumers need different
products at different stages of life (teens, young singles, married couples,
families with kids, empty nesters, active retirees, frail elderly).
-- Psychographic segmentation: Profiles consumers by a combination of
attitudes, values, beliefs, self-image, lifestyles, or opinions.
-- Geographic segmentation: Targets areas as small as a neighborhood or
zip code or as broad as a country or continent.
-- Vertical industry segmentation: Targets all elements within a defined
industry as a B2B strategy.
-- Job segmentation: Identifies different decision makers (such as engineers,
purchasing agents, and managers) at specific points of the B2B sales cycle.
-- Specialty segmentation: Targets a narrowly defined market (such as
45- to 65-year olds, female caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s, or
16- to 35-year-old male owners of classic Mustangs).
Follow classic guerrilla marketing principles: Focus on one market segment
at a time, gain market share and profits, and then invest in the next market
segment. Otherwise, your limited marketing time and advertising funds are
spread too thinly to have a significant impact. For more information on market
segmentation, try www.businessplans.org/segment.html or http://money.howstuffworks.com/marketing-plan12.htm.