What criteria do you use for segmenting the market, and how does it influence your marketing strategy?

There's many ways to segment the market depending on situation, market, product.

But consider 2 risks:

• Too complex and hard to use - sometimes this happens because you have a lot of data, and you can use some fancy analysis techniques and "geek out" to find the "perfect" segments. The problem is that no one understands the result, and you have no way to operationalize that in targeting, qualification, or briefings.

• Too broad - you define for example just by company size - this can be too generic and doesn't give enough focus, try to add more variables like company industry, region and department.
  

How you segment can represent how you look at the market and give you insight and inspiration. Go beyond the obvious and try to see if it helps position and explain the product.

For example, an e-signature tool can be segmented by the department/persona that uses it (Sales, HR, Marketing, Finance, Legal) or by the recipient (Customer, Employee, Supplier). These two POVs will shape how you market and think about the product.