By JOHNNY CARCIOPPOLO / Community Columnist

Choosing a strategic segment to market to is essential in your business. Who should you be going after? Who makes sense? Instead of battling it out with people that don’t play to your strengths, be a little more strategic and play to people that are more ideal for you.

They don’t have to be your most ideal clients, just a strategic segment that you can go after and serve effectively. To do that there’s basically three steps to go through.

1: Your values and your strengths. Figuring this out is kind of like the story of the chicken and the egg. It doesn’t matter whether you figure out your strengths first and then your values or vice-versa, because typically what you are good at you value and what you value you’re usually very good at. Identify these first then go to the next step.

2: Your experience and your expertise. If you think about it, it’s easy to see the dovetail or the overlap of your values and strengths. What you are identifying next is your experience, what you’ve done and your expertise that you’ve developed. Those two things, when thinking of a Venn diagram, those two circles would kind of overlap.

3: What is a market that makes sense for those two? After identifying your expertise and some values and strengths, it’s time to think about what market actually fits with that. Now you’ve got the third ring in the Venn diagram that fits there, but here’s the caveat, here’s the little asterisk on the bottom. It’s a market that, yes, fits with those other two but that’s easy to identify and market to. That is a key thing because you might choose a market that fits really, really well, but they’re really difficult to try to get a hold of. There’s no list. They’re not part of an association. They’re not part of any particular demographic so it becomes really difficult to try and contact them. This is key in your business because you need some sort of strategy to be able to easily contact them, reach out to them, serve them and become an authority there. Be sure the market you chose not only fits to your strengths and expertise, but is also easily reachable.

Let’s review.

The three steps to choosing your Strategic Segment are:

-Identify your values and strengths.

-Identify your expertise and experience.

-Choose a market that makes sense and fits, but it’s also easily reachable to market to.