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.