SSN Marketing

Furthermore, if we can group customers according to their needs, we can communicate with them in ways that will resonate and encourage them to buy more from us.

Researchers have a variety of questions that they use to segment customers and potential customers.

Above all, we are trying to identify segments of customers with different needs so we can tailor our products and services to better satisfy what they want.

Some of these questions are geared to segment customers at the time they are choosing a supplier in the first instance and other questions are used to show how they can be segmented in terms of their satisfaction and loyalty once they have become customers.

Behavior can also be a good indicator of needs. Customers that switch suppliers regularly, or use multiple suppliers, or buy at infrequent intervals, may all have needs reflected by these patterns of behavior.

These firmographic considerations are critically important as they are easily recognized characteristics and they are very often a good indication of needs.

Their demographic characteristics (we refer to them as firmographics) can be classified according to the size of the company, industry vertical, the number of years the company has been established, its geographical location, whether it is a private or public enterprise and so on.

Business customers can similarly be categorized, though not necessarily in the same way.