企业对企业市场细分

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.

公司可以在细分中考虑几个不同的变量。

• 行为
• 盈利能力/终身客户价值
• 优点 / 属性
• 联合分析
• 用途或应用
• 产品类别
• 价格/质量需求
• 竞争者

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.

迈克尔·贝克 (Michael Baker) 著营销” asserts that Market Positioning should include quantitative analysis.  He advanced the following quantitative analysis:

潜在市场规模 x 渗透概率

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:

市场客户潜力 x 客户份额

企业对企业细分研究的一些注意事项：

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:
   对于信息系统管理人员来说，微软是一个最具性价比的软件包品牌，因为它具有附加功能、服务和有竞争力的价格。
5. 随着客户需求的快速变化，我们将继续致力于研究

为什么在市场细分中要针对重度用户？

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. 从长远来看，忠诚度的提高可以降低客户获取成本
3. Marketing costs can become cheaper, as customers increase the frequency of purchase

B2B营销的一般准则：

• 新手
  • 注重产品优势
  • 信息组织良好时学习效果更好
  • 受益于多次接触信息
• 专家
  • 关注产品属性
  • 轻松了解消息是否有序
  • 受益于一次性信息