Before you go out and start your first online marketing campaign, you need to know who exactly you want the campaign to reach. Marketing segmentation can take many forms, online marketing segmentation is not drastically different to offline segmentation:

For example, offline segmentation, you need to know where your target audience goes on a regular basis, and put your advertising money there. It’s the same online, what websites do your potential customers already surf.

Here are some of the ways you can segment your market:
(Always remember the better you know your target audience, the easier it will be to find a place to fit your marketing.)

1. Demographic segmentation – simply segment your audience by age, gender, education level, or socio-economic status.

2. Lifecycle segmentation – this form of segmentation understands that consumers need different products at different stages in their life, and you need to target just one of these stages (e.g. elderly)

3. Geographic segmentation – in this form of segmentation, you target a specific place, as small as a neighborhood or as large as a country.

4. Job segmentation – segmenting by jobs or occupational roles takes into consideration the job of the particular person at work. For example, you might be targeting just the accountants of a particular industry.

5. Specialty segmentation – this identifies an extremely tight and niche audience that is facing a common issue or have a common interest. For example, you could be targeting only the people that own vintage VW cars.

The power of the Internet is that it can captures the global economy, and because of this, it is best to really niche your focus and find a segment that you can really serve well. By focusing on your segment, it will be easier for you to reach out to that group and gain their attention.