No matter how big or small your audience is, customers, today want a personalized buying experience. Audiences are eager for information tailored to their specific needs. The more you can meet these needs and answer their questions, the better your chances of winning them. For marketers, this requires a strong understanding of customers’ personalities and their customers’ journeys. Therefore, you can deliver the most useful, relevant content that corresponds to current challenges and questions.
If all this is the beginning, we can call it Audience segmentation.
Audience segmentation, as the name suggests, divides larger audiences into smaller and more homogeneous groups based on known attributes, questionable characteristics, and similar demographics or interests. In this way, marketers can tailor their marketing messages and content to the similarities of each segment. The ultimate goal is personalization for potential individual customers.
What is Audience Segmentation?
Audience segmentation segments a large audience based on shared characteristics to better analyze response data. These groups are called segments. This process is often done to determine the audience’s reaction to consumer products. Still, it can also be done to analyze audience data on social concepts, political ideas, or candidates. Using audience segmentation, research analysts can break down significant, frequently collected responses into targeted segments that can inform marketing, product, or media decisions. Audience segmentation divides the audience of your campaign into different user groups. You can target each segment with other ads and then compare the results.
Segmentation can be carried out on a wide range of criteria. Common categories for audience segmentation include age, gender, education level, income level, geographical location, and political relation. Usually, segmentation is defined using various criteria. For example, some women between the ages of 18-49. Since a segment like this can include millions of women of different origins and perspectives, psychological and behavioral characteristics are often used to create more specific groups. For example, a manageable subcategory could be women from Dec 18 to 49 who self-identify as Democrats.
Suppose segmentation is used for advertising a product you want to market. In that case, information may be provided from the internet based on DoubleClick cookie IDs or mobile device IDs such as iOS and Android. It is crucial to identify the difference between ads targeting each segment. This way, you can define your next campaign’s most effective advertising strategy. The audience cannot be segmented unless they have DoubleClick cookies or device IDs.
Why is Audience Segmentation Important?
Audience segmentation has been an essential part of marketing strategy for decades. As more and more buyers conduct their research online and make purchasing decisions, it becomes even more critical for the overall success of marketing.
Segmentation is not only an excellent analytical model but also a revolution of mind and perspective in marketing. A potent tool that changes the customer approach from end to end has the potential to influence and transform all processes and organizations of the corporation in the long term.
However, it is helpful to remember that the segmentation to which we attribute such great power is not a magic wand that will come from outside and illuminate our world instantly and save us a lot of money in the short term. For segmentation to show its power, it is necessary to address it with a vision and business knowledge that is at least as strong as it is, to keep it alive and grow it with patience and care. It is not difficult to foresee that the institutions that will make a difference both today and in the future are the institutions that will achieve this.
With Audience segmentation;
- You can better understand the wishes and needs of the consumer segment and even improve the products or services belonging to your brand in this way.
- You can define your target audience daily and improve your company’s marketing and sales solutions.
- You ensure that your marketing budget is used more efficiently because you have determined your target market.
- By bringing your customers together with relevant content or campaigns, you gain customer loyalty and thus gain an advantage in the competition against your competitors.
Reasons to Segment Your Audience 3 Crucial Audience Segmentation Strategies
The type of segmentation depends on your target. In addition, you can combine and use one or more of the segment types in the strategies or create your segmentation by creating different parameters.
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Demographic, Behavioral, and Value Segmentation
It makes an essential contribution to developing a new product or service to be released while defining the target audience more accurately with demographic segmentation. Behavior segmentation is based on the customer’s habits, categorizing their behavioral characteristics and creating a segmentation. Unlike psychographic segmentation, it focuses on the customer’s purchasing processes and decision-making criteria. In addition, there are essential points of distinction, such as customer loyalty. With a behavior segmentation created, marketing or sales strategies can be planned by creating different processes according to the customers. For example, cross-selling activities can be organized here for a customer who shows purchasing behavior with a credit card and mostly shows mobile-to-app usage behavior. Value segmentation is a mixture of the above segments, and you can also think of it as an added version of financial inputs and outputs.
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Geographical Segmentation
This type of segmentation has recently begun to become relatively popular. It is an effective method for companies doing business worldwide, especially for customers in their regions, to accurately observe their density and distribution. For example, a company can use this segmentation to distribute it to locations such as branches or warehouses to serve customers scattered in its region at the right time and the most optimal cost.
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Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic segmentation based on lifestyle, interests, and individual activities categorizes customers’ attitudes and focuses. Psychographic segmentation can include many different factors. For example, a retailer can segment its data according to the value of “budget awareness.” It can categorize by observing the shopping attitudes of its customers. Customers who are frugal and think about long-term shopping can develop unique campaigns for customers who like fast shopping in a short time.
How to Do Audience Segmentation?
Audience segmentation helps marketers see customers as individuals in three simple steps so that it becomes possible to maintain and deepen relationships at great speed and scale.
1. Step: Collect the correct data
Between smartphones and the Internet of Things, our digital space is growing in astronomical terms. The number of audience data contact points is booming. However, only 25% of marketers collect customer data. It is emphasized that every data point is part of the puzzle with this issue. The more puzzle pieces you contain provide, a clearer view.
2. Step: Use audience segmentation to interpret customer behavior and draw conclusions from it
After collecting your data, it’s time to put it to work. Segmentation tools such as Watson Marketing Insights are moving intensively to understand and segment audiences accurately. Companies are investing a considerable amount in this area. The investment in marketing analytics is expected to increase from 4.6% to about 22%, that is, by 376%, in the next three years.
3. Step: Track, test, and optimize
Only 10% of US marketers feel they have successfully managed the customer experience. To create a better customer experience, you need a continuous feedback loop between your campaigns and your analytics tools. When you link them together, the results from existing campaigns can provide feedback through analysis tools. This creates a feedback loop in which the campaign performance informs the optimization of the masses.
While the above suggestions are a good start for thinking about how to segment your target audience, there are hundreds of different strategies that you can use and each with its benefit.
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