nadheera.com/blog launched in new domain

Hi all,

Thank you very much for reading for 6+ months. I'm continuing my blog in  www.nnulk.blogspot.com - new address and a new layout that gives me lot more options when posting all your favourite articles.

So please visit www.nnulk.blogspot.com and enjoy reading....

Market Segmentation Online 4 : What type of Internet time waster are you?

[This is the simplified version of an E-Marketing article I wrote for work blog. You can find the link in previous E-marketing posts]


All dudes and dudettes wasting their time online can be separated to 6 different parts based on the time you spend online & your activity. They are

• Simplifiers - Use internet for a specific task like googling for some assignment, paying CIMA fees...etc
• Surfers - Comes online to see whats new. For e.g."Who's in a relationship with whom"...etc.
• Connectors - Comes online to connect with communities - Mainly the Facebookers. People who have FB as your home page
• Bargainers - Comes online to find good deals. E.g. Whats cheapest in ODEL...etc
• Routiners - Comes online primarily to read stuff (Like reading my blog)
• Sportsters - Same like routiners, But comes online for Sports & Entertainment mainly - I know loads of people using internet primarily to visit cricinfo or Elakiri.com which are sports & entertainment sites

Classification by time spent and other details given below

You know who you are than any of us. So vote in the poll, what category you are in?

Market Segmentation Online : 3. Segmentation Bases

Online marketing is typically the same as Traditional marketing in terms of the bases. Only exception is that there are numerous different bases that could be adopted in online marketing.


Segmenting bases are


1. Demographics
E.g.Age, Income, Gender, Education level, ethnicity

Following are some basic demographics on Linked - In

2. Geo-graphics
This is basically the segmentation by location.
E.g. City, Village, State, Country, Region..etc.
Google Analytics provides a very good tool with which you can even track the city of your site visitors (In Sri Lanka - Only Colombo and Kandy Possible, But in US hundreds of cities possible)
Given below are geographic data about Facebook users.

3. Psychographics
Activation, Interests, opinions, Personality, Values...etc.

4. Behaviour with respect to the Product
 Usage, Benefits sought, Brand loyalty, user status..etc.


Will be discussed in detail in the next E-Marketing post.


Apart from this basic bases, even combined bases like geo-demographics could be used.


Or as i said above numerous bases like "Budget" can be used.


These bases are specially important in Search Engine Optimization and online market research. For e.g. Check out how people visited social networking sites -

Next we shall discuss Market segmentation by behaviour in detail - The most important of the four bases.

E Marketing 6 : Market Segmentation Online : 1.Basic Markets

There are two tiers of marketing strategy 1. Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning or STP Marketing. Second is 4Ps with CRM strategy (We will discuss in the future.) Segmenting is the first of those 1st tier strategies.

Lets discuss online market segmentation.

 

First post about segmenting is about the three basic markets that both sell and buy to each other. They are Businesses, Governments and consumers.

1. Business Market
Contains the businesses and institutions. In the most biggest market in internet because many firms are present online than consumers. This is why B2B activity online is only second to B2C.
For e.g.

1. DHL - maintains a database of its' corporate clients. And the clients can login to their companies account and see where their package is.

2. A web designing company will directly target the Business Market. 

2. Government Market

 

This is applicable to many developed countries, where governments purchase online. Not very much applicable to Sri Lanka yet. But take a country like US - US govt. is the worlds largest buyer of goods and service (http://www.sba.gov/contractingopportunities/index.html)

But businesses willing to target govt market will have unique challenges like rules,paperwork..etc.

Joke - Knowing someone with surname "Rajapakshe" can be of help in Sri Lanka, Still you have to be careful with govt, since we all know about what happened to Hi-Corp deal.

3. Consumer Market

Is the biggest ever market. And the market potential is unlimited. Majority of products target this market for its capacity. The success stories of online marketing directed at consumers are Amazon, Ebay, 1-800 Flowers and Kapruka, Topjobs.lk and gossiplankanews.

We will next talk about examples to all these three markets selling to each other. i.e. B2B, B2C, B2G, C2B, C2G, C2C - so on and so forth examples.