Who do you work for?

Q. Is your restaurant planning a Mother’s Day promotion?

Get to know your market segmentation with these four customer profiles

By Patti Hone


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Business owners don’t work for themselves, they work for their customers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, be it food, equipment or a consulting service; the best products aren’t sold, they’re bought. So who’s buying your product or service, how did they hear about you, and why do they buy from you? How can you reach more people like them?

A critical factor in discovering more about your customer is market segmentation; defining the who’s who of your clientele. What do they have in common with each other, and how can you attract more like them?

Customer profiles can be broken down into the following four areas:

1. Geographics – Profiling customers based on what city, province, and country they’re from; this can be as targeted as a neighborhood or street.

2. Demographics – How old are your customers? Are they male or female, do they fall into a certain income bracket? Are they married or single?

3. Psychographics – Find out what kind of behavioral patterns or lifestyle characteristics they share. What are their beliefs, values and attitudes towards themselves and society?

4. Geodemographics – Also known as cluster marketing, geodemographics combines all the above. Its basic premise is that people who have similar backgrounds, or live in the same area tend to have the same buying habits and patterns. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

By knowing your customer geodemographics you will know how to reach your customers. Understanding their demographics will help you know who to reach, and by using psychographics, you’ll know how to reach them. Once you know who you’re trying to reach, you need to know what to say in order to make them buy from you. How do you motivate, inspire and attract them to buy?

Today’s marketplace offers an overwhelming selection of products and services, so you need to ensure that whatever you are offering stands out from the pack. Are your products and services better quality, better priced, more readily available and unique to the marketplace?

When consumers gravitate to a business, their decisions are rarely based on marketing messages alone — they rely on their own experiences. They choose to stay loyal based on what they have seen, sensed and experienced. As a result, you should devote the bulk of your marketing efforts to the steps that lead up to the sale. Target your customers. Ensure that your product line meets your customer’s needs and communicates your offering in a way they can relate to. If you accomplish this, when your customer is ready to buy all you have to do is facilitate the exchange and they won’t feel like you’ve “sold” them anything. Never underestimate the power of the relationship. Your customers may choose to buy from your business over another simply because you make them feel better when they walk through your door.

The first-time customer can be a costly one. They walk through your door, purchase your product and then leave never to be seen again. If, on the other hand, you can attract a customer that will buy repeatedly from you then the investment you’ve made to attract that customer is amortized over the life of that relationship and your profitability based on that investment will grow, too. It’s the relationship that you develop with your customer that makes the difference. Customers who are treated well and who receive consistently good products and service develop into loyal customers. Loyal customers make repeat purchases, and they become ambassadors for your business. Customers are king. The only boss that really matters in business is the person who just opened their wallet.

So, who do you work for?

About the author:

Patti Hone, As You Like It Marketing & Communications. For more information, visitt www.asyoulikeitmarketing.com

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