Customer Segmentation In "Special Marketing" Of Small And Medium Sized Enterprises

Today, the market environment is diversified, greatly improving the importance of customer segmentation.

Market differentiation has created numerous opportunities for segmentation.

At the same time, the diversification of channels and media has provided great convenience for enterprises to create targeted marketing value for subdivision customers.

"Precision marketing" has arisen.

No matter what type of enterprise, there is an urgent need to effectively define the customer segmentation group and quantify it to achieve the ultimate goal of precision marketing -- the optimal ratio between promotion cost and gross profit of sales.

However, in the process of promoting customer segmentation, small and medium-sized enterprises often encounter more obstacles than large ones.

The reasons are mainly from two points: first, from the technical point of view, the high cost of customer segmentation and the high demand for data analysis are obstacles that can not be overcome in the short term; second, from a strategic perspective, SMEs are not intending to continue to narrow their audiences by the objective demand of their sales.

This is a very strange phenomenon: small and medium-sized enterprises, on the one hand, shout slogans of customer segmentation, but on the other hand, they convey to all customers information that is not subdivided or targeted.

"Precision marketing" has become empty talk.

On the other hand, some small and medium-sized enterprises simply understand precision marketing as one to one customer marketing.

In fact, providing personalized services to customers in VIP channels that create core values will have some beneficial effects on the actual sales of enterprises.

However, due to the VIP channel customers often end up, the needs of different VIP channel customers are not the same, and it is difficult to balance. Often, there will be a situation of "treating one by one and damaging one economy", which will make the small and medium-sized enterprises badly battered.

Although theoretically, enterprises and channel businesses are the community serving consumers, but the interests of the two will often conflict.

The increasingly fierce market competition environment makes most SMEs do not have terminal pricing power.

Pricing is often the pricing of collateral.

The increasing cost of raw materials also makes SMEs lose the space to further reduce production costs.

From production cost to terminal pricing, limited space for price difference is being fiercely contended by enterprises and channel operators.

From this perspective, unless enterprises can have absolute pricing power or have the ability to substantially reduce production costs, enterprises and channel businesses will be difficult to coordinate interests.

Many people are aware of this.

The blue ocean theory is just to establish the absolute pricing power of enterprises.

Technological innovation is proposed to reduce production costs.

Whether it is blue ocean theory or technological innovation, for most small and medium enterprises, they all look "beautiful" and stay at the conceptual level.

For most small and medium-sized enterprises, the most important is still based on existing products, research and development capabilities, to provide customers with the greatest value, and thus enhance their own sales.

As a result, customer segmentation has gradually become the only way for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Who first put forward a differentiated proposition for differentiated customer groups, providing differentiated high-quality value, and who will become the winner of the industry.

Here, we can offer differentiated quality value to differentiated customer groups, which is called "special marketing".

Special marketing, as the name suggests, is aimed at developing specific marketing methods for specific audiences.

Here are two key questions: how to find specific audiences and how to develop personalized marketing methods.

Customer segmentation is only a means. Finding the most valuable specific audience is the goal.

How to find the most valuable audience?

There are two main indicators: corporate strategic objectives and customer group characteristics.

By distinguishing the characteristics of customer segmentation groups, we classify customers and find subgroups of customers that are in line with the strategic objectives of enterprises.

In this series of segmentation customer groups, we prioritize the sales value of customers, find the most valuable specific audience groups, and design marketing solutions for these segments to carry out marketing work.

Next, we will use the S business behavior in the frozen food industry as a case to illustrate the process of finding a specific audience in special marketing and analyzing the process of its group characteristics.

The main products of S are quick-frozen balls, quick frozen pasta and so on. They belong to the upper and middle echelons in the frozen food industry, and have certain brand awareness in East China, especially in Shanghai.

Quick-frozen food needs to be followed up by cold chain because of the particularity of products, so basically the products of this industry are sold in Carrefour and all large scale stores.

From the perspective of the whole industry, the product and price homogenization of each brand manufacturer is more serious, and it concentrates on the single channel in the store.

During the peak season, almost all enterprises in the industry will carry out promotional activities such as trial eating, price reduction, discount, buy and send, and so on.

The promotional effect is actually greatly reduced, and if it is not promoted, it will be squeezed by competing products.

Therefore, every sales season, S enterprises are in a dilemma.

After careful research, discussion and communication, S enterprises have made clear the strategy of implementing special marketing.

It is the first task for S enterprises to carry out customer segmentation and find the most valuable audiences.

1. customer sample information collection: the consumer component of the store channel is extremely complex, so the information collection for customer samples is also very large.

The information collection of customer samples is divided into several small parts.

The number of 1.1. samples: too few samples can not reflect the universality of customer information. Too much has greatly increased the difficulty and pressure of work.

Therefore, we have carried out a very detailed study of S enterprises.

In 2007, the sales of 8 main selling products in 34 single products of S enterprises accounted for 76% of total sales, sales accounted for 62% of total sales, and 8 main sales.