What is audience segmentation? | Learn how to segment your target audience.
Types of audience segmentation (with examples)
Here are some strategies for dividing up your audience:
Demographics
Behavior
You can choose the most effective method or timing for connecting with those customers by segmenting your audience according to their behavioral patterns. Analyzing shared behaviors to segment your audience means looking at:
Reach out to that group in the weeks preceding major holidays if you notice a section of your audience who frequently interacts with your company before those holidays. You might gain more if you regularly contact that group throughout the year if a different segment of your audience buys things on a monthly basis.
Stage in a buyers journey
Customers in the consideration stage might be more interested in content that provides in-depth information on pertinent features. Consider sending this audience segment more detailed information about your products or recent customer reviews, for instance, if your business manufactures electronics.
Level of engagement
People who interact with your brand frequently might prefer to get more in-depth content, such as information on loyalty programs or exclusive access to your newest products. Content that highlights the benefits of your products or best features may be more helpful to customers who engage with you less frequently.
An illustration of a win-back email campaign is when a monthly food subscription service offers a discount code or new products to entice past customers who have paused or canceled their subscriptions.
Preferred device
Some of your potential customers might be more likely to view your content on their mobile devices, as you may have noticed. Because desktop browsers display websites differently than mobile browsers, a customer’s preferred device is important. It’s best to optimize your website depending on the type of device a customer is using to view it because mobile device users may become irritated more quickly if they find that certain buttons or functions are difficult to access on their smaller screens.
Using a mobile device as an example, customers may interact with your brand primarily through shorter emails, social media posts, and other compressed content. You could then target this group with shorter content by creating an audience segment for them.
Psychographics
A marketing tactic known as psychographics looks at a user’s online behaviors to infer their values, emotions, interests, goals, and personality traits. Marketing professionals can emphasize the features of their goods or services that are most important to that audience segment by understanding the psychographics of their target market.
Consider using humorous content to target customers who enjoy comedy movies and TV shows, for instance, if you find that a portion of your audience does. Another illustration would be to emphasize how your product or service lowers costs so that a segment of your audience who enjoys traveling can spend more on their vacations.
Combined tactics
Many marketing teams discover that their best results come from combining various audience segmentation techniques. Combining two or more of the aforementioned audience segmentation techniques is possible. Combining various audience segmentation techniques can help you further tailor your marketing materials to different demographics.
Consider this as an illustration: If you find that the majority of your clients are business managers who access your content via desktop browsers, you could create an audience segment based on both their demographics and preferred device.
What is audience segmentation?
A marketing strategy known as audience segmentation divides your target market into smaller groups based on their shared needs, values, traits, or behaviors. Segmentation acknowledges that various groups will react to social and behavior change communication messages and interventions in different ways. Marketers can more easily segment their audiences by using a variety of tools for search engine marketing, social media marketing, and other channels.
Why is audience segmentation important?
Because they don’t want to exclude any customers, businesses may be reluctant to segment their audiences and instead try to create content that will appeal to everyone. This frequently leads to the creation of generic, flat marketing materials that may end up appealing to even fewer people.
Because audience segmentation personalizes your marketing efforts, it prevents mediocrity. Marketing departments can: When they target relevant audience subgroups with their marketing efforts, they can:
How to complete audience segmentation
Following are some guidelines for developing an efficient audience segmentation plan:
1. Create detailed audience segments
Marketing to particular segments of your audience is made easier with the aid of audience segmentation. Without audience segmentation, or with only limited audience segmentation, businesses may struggle to meet the unique needs of their customers.
However, the opposite is also a potential concern. Only a small portion of your clients may fit into audience segments you create if the criteria are overly strict.
Let your companys customer data guide your audience segmentation. For instance, it is a better use of your time to concentrate on the 70% of your customers who live in cities if only 1% of your customers reside in rural areas. Ideally, you can then identify a more useful way to divide up your rural customers, such as if you notice they’re most inclined to buy in the spring.
2. Set and measure goals
You can determine the effectiveness of your audience segmentation by setting measurable marketing goals. Although one of your objectives is probably to increase customer engagement, the goal’s parameters and purpose make it difficult to determine whether or when you have succeeded. Your marketing department should establish objectives to determine the effectiveness of its audience segmentation strategies. Here are some sample goals:
3. Use and optimize different channels
Investigate the impact of various channels on the level of audience engagement for each segment. Channels used to communicate with your audience might include:
Keep tabs on how each of your target audiences responds to these channels. You might discover, for instance, that your more extroverted clients prefer social media engagement while your more introverted clients favor email marketing. Once you have this information, you can tailor your future email and social media marketing campaigns to these two distinct audience segments.
4. Be willing to try new tactics and make changes as needed
The method you used to segment your audience may occasionally not be effective. Additionally, your current audience segments may be successful for a few months before shifting. It might take a few tries for your company’s audience segmentation to produce the best results, and some companies discover that their customer profiles are constantly changing.
Be prepared to alter the segment criteria or method if your audience segmentation is not yielding the desired results. Look over your customer information once more and see if you can segment your customers into new or different subgroups.
FAQ
What is meant by audience segmentation?
a marketing approach based on segmenting the target market to deliver more individualized messaging for stronger connections The subgroups may be determined by factors related to demographics, including place of residence, gender identity, age, race or ethnicity, income, or level of formal education.
What are the 4 types of segmentation?
Although the four primary types of market segmentation are thought to be geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral, there are many additional tactics you can employ, as well as numerous variations on the four primary types. Here are several additional strategies you might want to consider
What is an example of a segmented audience?
Simply put, audience segmentation is the process of dividing a frequently enormous audience into more manageable portions based on their personalities and preferences. For instance, if you run a car dealership, you might divide customers into groups based on their age to offer new drivers special discounts.
Why is the audience segmentation important?
Using audience segmentation, you can divide your target market into groups based on their shared interests or purchasing patterns. You can reach each customer with marketing that is pertinent to him or her by segmenting your audience and creating marketing messages tailored to each segment.
