Audience segmentation is a key for effective customer experience.
Don’t believe? Keep a close eye on this article.
Today’s customer expects a personalized experience from brands and to meet their demands, you must have more profound insights into your customers.
Even though you know about it, you might have ended up with the thought of its burn of money.
However, to gain in this digital marketing scenario, you must switch from blanket to customer/audience segmentation approach to reach your audience with the right offer and appropriate message.
Most of the brands have already deployed audience segmentation and built their brand image.
If you’re still in confusion where to start and what exactly audience segmentation is?.
Here we are taking you to few concepts that clears all your questions-
- What is Audience Segmentation?
- Why is Audience Segmentation Important?
- Benefits of Audience Segmentation
- Types of Audience Segmentation in Digital Marketing
- How to do Audience Segmentation?
- Tips for Audience Segmentation
Let’s begin!
What is Audience Segmentation?
To put it in simple, Audience segmentation is one of the marketing strategies that focus on enhancing the customer experience by offering the right product at the right time with compelling messages to the audience.
In Audience segmentation, a large chunk of the audience is segmented into subgroups based on specific parameters such as demographics, behavior, preference, interest and many more precise levels of details.
It helps the brands to get a clear understanding of their audience which group of people are looking for what and for which product they show interest and how to target them.
To make you understand this, let’s Consider few audience segmentation examples-
If you have a stock of school shoes in your shop, obviously, you consider couples who have children in schools.
Similarly, if you’re launching a mobile phone, you segment people based on their past purchases, so that you can segment people based on their preferences in the past.
In the same way, you can segment an audience in a variety of ways. But, before discussing the various types of audience segmentation in digital marketing.
Let’s First Know Why is Audience Segmentation Important?
Audience segmentation became a vital part of any brands to reach their audience at the right time with the right offers. Apart from this audience segmentation can bring a lot more ease to the marketers in achieving their overall goal.
Let’ put light on it-
- Helps to bring a personalized experience to your audience.
- Defining your target audience and preventing you from wasting time and money on an irrelevant audience.
- Give the way to convert your prospective customers to active customers.
- Provide you with the way to get more sales from up-selling and cross-selling.
- Convey your message to the right audience
- Improves and brings more customer loyalty across the customer life-cycle.
- Meet the specific demands of the customers and grow sales
- Builds customer engagement with your brand.
- Enhances customer experience at various stages of the customer lifecycle.
80% of consumers are inclined more towards a brand which brings personalized experiences. (Source: Epsilon)
It’s clear that customers feel privileged when they get special attention from brands with their name in messages. Also, they pay special attention to such messages.
In Addition to This, the List of Benefits of Audience Segmentation is Also Very Long.
Let’s Check Them Out Here-
Audience segmentation empowers you to get better insights of your customers, understand what is required, when and why. Also, you get the time to design your product or services according to their specific needs of the customer.
Let’s discuss them out here in detail-
Create Compelling Messages
When your sales and marketing team knows what your customer is looking for, it’s easy for them to reach out to the audience with the right offers and provide solutions which meet their needs ahead of time.
Create Hyper-Targeted Ads
While creating online campaigns, you should first create a buyer persona of your targeted audience. After that, you can target audiences by considering their demographic, behavior, psychographics, and many more factors. The more precise factors you consider while creating a campaign, the more fruitful results you get from running a digital campaign.
Convert Quality Leads
When you have complete knowledge of what your customer is looking for, it’s easy to convert the prospects customers to regular customers and inactive customers to active customers.
Differentiate your Brand from Competitors
Effective customer experience is a competitive differentiator for brands in today’s marketing world. With Audience segmentation in practice, it will be effortless for you to build strong customer experience and gain loyalty and engagement of the customers.
Recognize Niche Market Opportunities
You can segment your large set of the audience into smaller groups with various ways to target them more precisely.
Also, you can combine two sets of segmented audiences for broader reach.
Stay Focused
Audience segmentation will help you to be in focus on your marketing goals.
It enables you to identify new opportunities prevailing in the market and avoid diversions that will lead you away from your target market.
So, you must be wondering where to start to deploy it in your business? Most of the brands start with creating a buyer persona that can include-
- Person age,
- Marital status,
- Income status,
- Number of persons in the family,
- Credit card score,
- Their preference,
- Interests, Hobbies,
- And many more details.
Once a buyer persona is created after that, you can separate them into subgroups and target separately or by combining the two or more groups.
It helps the brands to understand the pain points of the customers and provide solutions that are specific to them.
Before segmenting your target audience, you must know what the various types of audience segmentation categories marketers generally use.
Let’s Discuss the Types of Audience Segmentation Here.
Generally, marketers segment the audience based on the demographics, behavior and stage of the buyer’s journey.
It is also based on the type of product or service you offer and the type of marketing channel you use.
Consider an example- If you’re a watch brand, you can segment the audience based on the people who use premium watches, type of watch they use, age, job, income level, credit score, number of members in the family, type of business they have and many more precise levels of information.
Here is the Audience Segmentation Each in Detail-
Demographics
This type of segmentation is the most preferred audience segmentation of marketers for almost every business. The reason for its popularity is it works well.
Demographic factors include- income level, age, job type, addresses, and all these demographic factors you can consider to segment your audience.
Behavior
This type of audience segmentation is a little more precise than demographics. It mainly includes-
- Analyzing the behavior of the people,
- The way they purchase products,
- Which type of products they prefer,
- How often they buy
- And how they make payments.
At every stage of the customer journey, brands need to approach customers in that way. Behavioral segmentation can help you in that to target an audience at a particular stage of their customer journey like-
- First-time visitors/buyers,
- Prospective buyers,
- Regular customers
- Retargeting the defectors who switched to other brands,
- And various other stages.
Buyer’s Journey
Buyer’s journey mainly goes through three stages- Awareness, Consideration and Decision.
Usually, when visitors visit you for the first time, they don’t have any knowledge of your products or services you offer. To make them aware, you need to approach them in an introductory way.
Similarly, when customers know about you and your products or services, you can reach them with the right offers which suit them instead of again introducing your brand to them.
Also, at the decision stage, you need to approach them with the additional features of your products or services that can help them in making decisions because, at that stage, they compare your offers with your rivals.
Level of Engagement
Every customer has a different level of engagement with your brand. Like some people just sign-up with you and won’t come back again. Some after registrations visit it two to three times a month. Similarly, some people visit your website very often on your website. Their visits to your website show their interest in your products or services.
By considering this, you can check which pages they are visiting most and for what purpose and which factors hindering them in buying. Also, excite the low-level engaged audience with exciting offers to win them back.
Type of Device Audience Use
Customers have lots of choices to select from devices. We can’t predict which type of device a customer can use.
Based on the type of business you have, you can target the mobile/PC/laptop/tablet device.
For example- people who are looking for near me search they look into mobile on the go. So such a type of business can opt for mobile-based segmentation. Similarly, if people are looking to increase traffic to their long-form contents, they can go for desktop segmentation.
It makes it effortless for the audience to reach their purpose to visit you. And hence fulfill the purpose of you both.
Combining Strategies
You can consider two types of audience segmentation in digital marketing to expand your reach further.
Consider an example- You can consider demographic and behavioral segmentation in combination. In cases such as the people who lie in a particular area with interest in buying a specific product. Here you are targeting the audience more precisely, and also it increases the scope of your targeting audience.
How to Do Audience Segmentation?
Build Customer Persona With Deeper Insights
Begin with considering the demographic factors of your audience first. Because it will help you to get all basic information of the audience and for more precise targeting you can combine it with insights into geographical, behavioral, and affinities.
You can also combine additionally with various platforms of the choice of your target audience. It will help you to drive effective marketing campaigns.
Keep an Eye on your Customer Steps
Whatever the product you have always consider the interest, preference of your audience, also how much time they spent on it and how often they buy it and how they respond to a particular product.
All these details will help you to plan ahead. Focusing on historical and behavioral information will help you in deciding which channel, platform and format of the message to select.
Merge your Data to Get More Personalized.
When you have more refined data at your place, you can combine data with different refined categories to get more actionable results from your customers.
With this, you can build the level of your brand by delivering right messages, personalization and responding correctly to customer needs.
It’s necessary for every brand to deliver customized messages at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Examine Usage and Requirements for More Distinction
Segmenting an audience based on which type of product or services they are looking for at the current point of time is also more effective to reach your customer demands and offer them accordingly.
It’s very much suitable for brands who have multiple offers to different sets of audience. Here you can focus on lookalike audiences too to add in your segmented audience.
Focus on Engaging Factor of your Audience for Better Reach
For better reach, understand the behavior of your audience what excites them across various marketing channels.
Like if you are running a stationary, providing discounts on some set of books will drive more sales.
Customer engagement factor will work like magic in generating more sales further; you can use this insight for future campaigns.
Tips for Audience Segmentation
Now you’re clear with which audience segmentation type to adopt and how.
While implementing this, you may encounter some of the challenges to overcome that; you must follow some tips. Here we are taking you to that-
Clearly Define your Audience Segmentation in a Broader Perspective
Even though you’re focusing on a specific segment of the audience in audience segmentation.
What if that segment ends up with only a single person or a few people it will ruin your efforts and money too.
So while targeting your audience, you must check the number of audiences that come under that category. You can further combine two or more segmented audiences for the further reach of your intended audience.
For example-
If you’re considering age factor along with the interest of people in buying that product or service in recent time will work for you.
Also to make it simple, you ask yourself with these questions before selecting a targeted audience for your campaigns such as-
- Can your product or service tackle the problem of your selected audience segment?
- The selected audience is relevant to your campaign.
- Are you sure enough what this audience is looking for? Where they spent most of their time? How often are they visiting a particular page of product or service? And similar other details.
Set your Goals and Measure them
Before going for audience segmentation, you must be clear with your marketing plan.
Once you have an idea, what is your end goal like awareness, reach, sales or conversion. Based on the marketing plan, you can consider a combination of one or more types of segments.
Consider for example– if you want to have awareness, you can find more than one set of segmented audience to increase your audience reach.
Similarly, if you’re looking only for sales, then you must consider the audience segmentation who are more likely to purchase your product.
While adding different types of audience segments, you must consider each segment must be in sync with the overall goal of the marketing plan.
Once you have done with your end, measure the outcome of your campaign.
If you didn’t get an expected result, consider tweaking the selection of the types of audience segmentation factor and again try for the same until you reach your marketing goal.
If you achieve your marketing goal in your first attempt, it’s great! No need for any tweaks, you can continue further.
Use the Omnichannel approach
As we all know, people are not adhering to a single platform or channels for carrying out any of the online activities they keep on changing based on their requirement, mood and interest.
To meet their end, you must adopt an omnichannel approach so that you can be available to your targeted audience whichever channel they make use of it.
For example-
If you’re targeting an audience by email and if that person already bought the product from social media platforms or any other channel and when you are again approaching them, it affects your customer experience.
Additionally, the omnichannel approach helps you in sync with your audience buying journey with that you can use the right channel which they preferred with the right message at every stage of their customer journey and with right offers.
Use Right Audience Segmentation Tools or platforms
To make all it simple, you have so many platforms/online tools in the market that work specifically for your marketing goals.
Let’s consider an example of one such platform that works wonder for you. That is AudiencePlay
It’s a DIY platform where you have all such options you’re looking for as a marketer. It can help you in segmenting your large set of the audience into subgroups on a precise level of factors.
For example-
- People who’re looking for Vistara flights
- Individuals who want to travel in August
- Persons who are looking for a rental house
- Women who have delivery in this particular month.
- Guys who buy sugar-free products.
All these granular level segmented audiences will help you to reach your end goals efficiently, and it’s possible in this platform.
In addition to this, you can-
- Monetize every footprint of your segmented audience by sharing their anonymous details. It leads to unlimited revenue streams in a highly secure way.
- Enrich your audience data by adding all the missing attributes from their second party or other partners.
- Provide you with the choice to run your marketing campaigns using omnichannel options directly.
To start with this, you just need to integrate your website or app with this platform or directly upload your audience data.
To Sum Up
Audience segmentation is one of the significant factors that drive effective marketing campaigns and customer experience.
It helps the brands to build a competitive differentiator that’s customer experience by providing a personalized experience to their audience and many more benefits.
Audience segmentation you can perform by adopting various types of segmentation based on factors such as- geographic, psychological, demographic, behavioral, and many more precise levels of details.
You have many online Audience segmentation tools and platforms that can help you in doing so. One of such platforms is AudiencePlay with a lot more additional features that fulfill your purpose beyond your expectations.
Register with us to segment and monetize your audiences effectively!!
