Affordably Simple Marketing™

Segmentation: Divide and Conquer

Artists are always looking for ways to make their marketing work harder for them. There are a lot of trendy marketing techniques that can improve your effectiveness, but the one that has proven itself time and time again is segmentation. This technique is particularly useful for you as an artist, because you often have different specialties that have uniquely different audiences.

Principle 1:

Marketing Segmentation isn't List Segmentation

The term "segmentation" comes up often in discussions of marketing, and means, quite simply, the way you divide your marketing program into separate promotional plans aimed at different audiences. Keep in mind that marketing segmentation isn't the same thing as list segmentation, which is how you group specific contacts within a targeted mailing list. If you are considering using marketing segmentation, the audiences you choose to target should be different enough that it is worth understanding their individual needs and creating a distinct promotional plan for each of them. For example: the target audience of a typical advertising photographer will mostly consist of art buyers and art directors at advertising agencies. However, most advertising photographers have specific niches they like to work in and the buyers relevant to these unique niches will have specific and very different needs when it comes to imagery. The value of segmenting your marketing is that you can send appropriate images to each, which increases the chance that your marketing will catch the eye of a buyer.

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Principle 2:

Segment only if it makes your marketing more effective

Marketing is most effective when it connects with your target audience's pain points and needs. Pain points are issues that make your audience's job difficult, for example: art buyers face a lot of risk when they hire an artist they've never used before because, if they hire the wrong person, the job could turn out to be an expensive disaster. So when you address their pain points with your marketing, you can start to earn the confidence of buyers. If you have multiple specialties, it is highly unlikely that the same messaging or image selection will address the various needs of all, so this is where segmentation becomes beneficial – it allows you to create the right impression with the diverse segments of your target audience. If you don't have different groups that need to be marketed to differently, then segmentation isn't going to help your marketing become anymore effective, and will only add to the time and cost.

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Principle 3:

Specialize in the areas that you are passionate about

Despite the fact that segmentation will increase the effectiveness of your marketing, there is a downside: the cost in time and money. The more campaigns you have to plan, create and send, the more time your marketing will take and the more it will cost. One of the core ideas of the Affordably Simple MarketingTM philosophy is that anything that gets in the way of you doing marketing is a problem. Although a less-segmented campaign may not be as effective, a campaign that never goes out won't bring you any results at all. The decision to segment is ultimately up to you. Only you can decide how much time and effort you can invest in your marketing while staying motivated to get it out there. That's why you should only segment when you have to.

Once you have decided whether to segment your marketing program or not, you have completed the last step in the planning portion of your marketing. You should, by now, also have a budget and a firm idea of the type of work you do. In the next article, we will get into the nitty-gritty of actually building your mailing list.