Googling for Market Segments

Your marketing team can use Google to identify the best ways to reach the target market for you product.

The users and buyers of your product have certain characteristics in common that place them in the target market. By searching for the right combinations of keywords in Google, a marketer can turn up discussion forums, blogs, Wikipedia entries, on-line periodicals, and other resources that might be useful in spreading the word about the product.

If the target market for your product is college students from wealthy backgrounds who use lots of text messaging, how about searching Google for

college student "text message"

If that query returns too many irrelevant results, how about searching for

fraternity student dodgeball

(Dodgeball is a text-messaging service. Students who use Dodgeball are likely to be heavy users of text messaging in general.)

You get the idea. The right combination of keywords will return sites and forums that prospective customers of your product are likely to visit. If your team can find ways of mentioning the product in these forums or even advertising on these sites, they will be getting the word out to the target market.

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