Facilitating conversations

Ideally you want to talk one on one with every single one of your customers and respond with solutions to their problems or better, learn enough about them to anticipate what you product or solution you should be building. 

This requires you to build huge content repositories which your "conversation engine" can pick from; either to start or to continue a conversation or even to close it. You also need rules; decision trees which anticipate how conversations can progress and point to the right response to be picked. 

All this is a lot of work and investment in time and money when you are starting off as a small enterprise. So, take small steps. As you start to move away from mass-marketing and move towards one-on-one marketing, there will be slow progress. You will first talk to smaller groups and then, yet smaller groups as you get better with customer profiling and targeting your messages to the audience. All the more reason for you to remind yourselves of micromarkets. 

If you pick well targeted benefit statements that appeal to the micromarkets and if we manage to build a well structured "dialog" with each micromarket, the results can be very gratifying.

Back to the original point..

Content is king..

I do not mean to trivialize the process of segmentation of customers. It remains one of the most difficult arts to practise. However, it is far from being the end of your campaign design. Targeting this finely segmented market (a collection of micro-markets each with their own needs, expectations and not to forget, business potential) with unique communication/ messaging and delivering it through the channel that best reaches them, is what is going to test you.

Who creates the messages? And who writes the content that will resonate with each of the target market and who provides the support points that will make the messages credible?

The internet made it easy to communicate but, it is akin to your being in the same room with your client. You still need to know what her individual needs are at that point in time and how to verbalize your solution to her needs. 

When you have one segment to chase and only one message (one person to chase in a crowded room with one single thought in mind) to deliver, perhaps you can handle it. When you have many segments and as many individual messages/ benefit statements to deliver, it gets tough. Not the delivery so much but being ready with the right benefit statement.

Micro-markets

or, why targeting is so much fun

The same product is used by different people in the same company in many different ways. Since it satisfies many different needs by its many features, some really interesting thoughts emerge.
- most products are over-designed for the ultimate use to which they are put.
- every product-application can be potentially a "micro-market" and a product's market is a sum of all the micromarkets.
As an example, your laptop is used for your spreadsheet, e-mail, typing letters, making presentations, watching DVD, surfing the net... all these are usages to which you put the machine. You may use one feature or you may use several. All these usages are micromarkets. Some micromarkets are viable(big enough or profitable enough) to be targeted standalone. Some require to be clubbed together and marketed as a "suite".
Video watching micromarket is a very interesting case. It resides in the DVD player, laptop, iPOD and the cellphone. In case of the DVD player, it is the mainstay of the product you are selling; in case of your cellphone, it is a small adjunct.
If your product is a laptop, you are positioning it in several micromarkets. Some work together in the customers' mind but some do not.
Knowing all possible usages of your product is useful so that you can cultivate those micromarkets and deliver messages that resonate with them. And, aligning the message sharply to the market is the acid test of marketing.