Segmenting your audience is a marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within your target audience in order to deliver a more tailored messaging for stronger connections. Your subgroups can be based on demographics such as location, gender, age, ethnicity, or income. They can also be based on behavior such as purchases made in the past. Many first-time marketers create uniform messaging and distribute it widely to save time. Audience segmentation uses a more refined approach to help you organize your contacts into smaller groups to give them what they really want. Below, we will dive deeper into how to segment your audience.
Why is audience segmentation important?
Audience segmentation helps make your marketing effort more personalized. It lets you define your target audiences, tailor your message to resonate specifically with them, drive up conversion rates, build a relationship and earn loyalty, and bring in leads to accelerate your sales cycle.
When a customer feels like a message was written specifically for them, they’re more likely to be receptive of what you have to say. With audience segmentation, this personalization can be made possible.
So where do you start? The best way is to create a customer persona that represents your ideal customer. Personas help you communicate with your audience on their level, especially when it comes to identifying their pain points. Once you create these personas, you can separate them into the appropriate groups.
Types of audience segmentation
Marketers often segment their audience based on factors such as demographics, behavior, and where they are in the buyer’s journey. However, what strategy you use depends on the product or service you’re delivering. Below, we will go into a few ways to segment your audience.
Demographics
This is the most common and easiest method to audience segmentation. Age, income, job type, and geographic location are all demographics you can use to sort your audience.
Behavior
This strategy goes a little deeper than demographic segmentation. Analyzing behavior means looking at what people buy, how often they make a purchase, and why they buy the product or service. With behavioral segmentation, your message is tailored to reach customers when they’re more likely to convert. To segment this group even more, you can split them into prospective buyers, first-time buyers, regular customers, and defectors who have switched to another brand.
Buyer’s journey progress
When you use this strategy, you tailor your messages based on where your customer is in their buyer’s journey. If you’re not familiar with the term, the 3 basic stages of the buyer’s journey are awareness, consideration, and decision. A buyer at the beginning of their journey could be finding out they have an issue to solve. While, one near the end already knows what to buy and is ready to make a choice. Instead of sending them the same message, segmentation can help you tend to each buyer’s different needs and answer the questions they may have.
Level of engagement
Regular customers require different marketing strategies than infrequent ones. If you can tell that someone is interested in your business, they’re more likely to open your message than someone who occasionally buys something. You can gauge this interest based on if they sign up to receive your emails and newsletters, but have not made any purchases. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore or deprioritize users with a low level of engagement. You can send them their own tailored campaign.