Segmentação de mercado business-to-business

Business-to-Business segmentation rarely receives the attention that its cousin discipline, customer segmentation, receives.  We at SIS International Market Research have compiled a few considerations for B2B segmentation.  This is not an exhaustive description, but an overview for understanding how business-to-business can help companies to grow their accounts and revenues.  SIS helps companies develop actionable segmentation plans that can boost profitability.

As empresas podem considerar diversas variáveis diferentes em suas segmentações.

• Comportamento
• Rentabilidade/Valor Vitalício do Cliente
• Benefício/Atributo
• Análise conjunta
• Uso ou Aplicação
• Classe de produto
• Exigências de preço/qualidade
• Concorrente

In Low-involvement product offerings, companies can consider researching usage behavior, buyer behavior, price elasticity / sensitivity and brand loyalty, among others.  For high and medium involvement products, businesses can consider researching their customers’ comprehensive needs, buyer types, business’ buying behavior and core values, among many others.  Lifetime Customer Value as a metric can provide companies a measurement of the value of a client to the firm; with research into each segment done by Lifetime Customer Value and the Pareto principle (80 20 rule), companies can make a concerted effort to improve profitability.  The variables for segmentation will vary by company and industry.

Michael Baker autor de “Marketing” asserts that Market Positioning should include quantitative analysis.  He advanced the following quantitative analysis:

Tamanho potencial do mercado x probabilidade de penetração

Customer share has received currency in the past two decades over market share as a useful metric.  Companies can estimate market potential with the following quantitative analysis:

Potencial do Cliente no Mercado x Participação do Cliente

Algumas considerações para pesquisa de segmentação Business-to-Business:

1. Avoid focusing too much on the product.  Rather, companies might consider a segmentation based on perceived benefits by each segment.  An example of this is with many software companies that focus only on functions, rather than the benefits that customers of many different sizes may perceive.
2. Avoid focusing on company size as a means to meet customer needs.  By putting companies in categories by how many employees they have, these segmentations can miss important insights and make smaller companies feel that their needs won’t be met.
3. Business-to-business segmentation needs to be useful to the company.  While companies can do vast amounts of research, the segmentation information needs to be relevant and actionable.
4. To create a clear market positioning that can be tested.  An example of a positioning statement is:
   Para os gestores de sistemas de informação, a Microsoft é a marca de pacote de software que oferece o maior valor pelo preço devido à funcionalidade adicional, ao serviço e aos preços competitivos.
5. Compromisso contínuo com a pesquisa à medida que as necessidades dos clientes mudam rapidamente

Por que direcionar usuários pesados na segmentação de mercado?

1. Companies can often extract the most value from these customers because they’re willing to spend.  According to the Pareto Principle / 80 20 Rule, companies can benefit from targeting the 20% of customers that compose 80% of their revenues.
2. O aumento da fidelidade reduz os custos de aquisição de clientes no longo prazo
3. Marketing costs can become cheaper, as customers increase the frequency of purchase

Diretrizes gerais para marketing B2B:

• Novatos
  • Concentre-se nos benefícios do produto
  • Aprenda melhor quando a mensagem está bem organizada
  • Beneficie-se de múltiplas exposições à informação
• Especialistas
  • Concentre-se nos atributos do produto
  • Aprenda facilmente se a mensagem está organizada ou não
  • Beneficie-se da exposição única à informação