How do you leverage best practices and learn from successful market segmentation cases in your industry?

In my company, we bridge gaps within the real estate industry. There’s a vast amount of professionals trying to make it and they crave for every opportunity there is to increase their chances of success. What I’ve found is that providing value requires not only knowing but truly understanding what's important to your audience, and at what level they rank you in their hierarchy of needs. After having a clear view of where you stand, tailor your messages based on your educated gut feel.

Remember that customers are not commoditised like products and services. You will see diverse behaviour within segments, so you should only use the limited (tenuous) customer data available to you if there is no other way to infer someone’s changing context, discovery and purchase intent. AI powered recommendations care more about someone’s clicktale to understand their intent since, for example, their demographic information is pretty useless at predicting that they might be shopping for their mother’s birthday. The sequence of items browsed is most useful for predicting what someone might do next (and therefore what to say or show to them). The question is: do you have that data or are you limited to hypothesis based buyer personas?

You can learn about your own customers from others who successfully market to them. What did they do to succeed? What characteristics did they use in marketing efforts? Look at their fly sheets, website, and datasets. How did they organize customer information in a way that led to success?

A structured approach combining research, analysis, and adaptation is key. A brief guide to help you maximize insights from market segmentation success stories: Analyze Segment-Specific Products and Campaigns: Study the GTM campaigns and service offerings tailored for specific segments by competitors and leaders in the industry. Identify Relevant Variables: Based on successful industry examples, evaluate which segmentation factors are most applicable to your targets. Focus on Relevant Pain Points and Needs: Look at how other companies address specific customer pain points or needs within each segment. Validate Segmentation Fit: Use the approaches that worked well for others, but validate them against your customer data to ensure fit.

Don't go through this process unless you're comfortable (a) doing it quickly and efficiently, (b) being ruthless about the results (e.g., killing X, even if it's your baby; doubling down on Y), and (c) pivoting & changing (do this exercise constantly - the market is dynamic, you should be as well).