What is Audience Segmentation?

Audience segmentation is a strategy that avoids having to create “billboard-style” advertising and marketing efforts that don’t address specific concerns. Older forms of marketing had to assume that many different audiences would see an advertisement: some would like it, some would hate it, and some would ignore it. Today, what sells to one audience will not sell to another; therefore we have to cater our marketing to individual groups.

Audience segmentation comes down to asking for the information you want and organizing the information you have. The goal is to use targeted messages, especially in the form of email marketing, that will offer the audience you’ve selected exactly what they want when they want it. Audience segmentation also allows you to go deeper with your marketing efforts and experiment: when you send out 3 different versions of a marketing email to different audience segments, you get a better feel for who your target market is and you can focus more intently on leads that will result in revenue.

1. Demographics – this includes the most commonly gathered information, such as ages, locations, genders, ethnicities, language background, etc. Some preferences for products fall roughly along demographic lines. After all, some products appeal more to 15-year-olds than to 60-year-olds – so demographic segmentation can help you get your message out precisely.
2. Behaviors – this audience segmentation can involve noticing how often someone visits your website or signs up for a content offer, or if they have previously purchased from you.
3. Psychographics – These statistics, for data such as surveys, reveal your potential leads’ interests, attitudes, personality types, or goals. This is often a harder way to segment your leads but may offer some very interesting concepts to add to your refined buyer persona in the future.
4. Geographics – Geographic segmentation tells you where your audience is located. It takes into consideration their location, the culture in that location, time zones, languages in that location, climate, population, and more.

Many people use their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or a digital marketing firm to segment their audience. The goal is to gather your potential customers into subgroups who have different buying motivations. A group of customers who purchased the product 6 months ago and might need a new one, or a group of potential leads who are the right age and gender to be interested in the product. You may experiment with very specific segments, but most experts agree that relatively general segments are a good way to start getting new data.

The goal, as you segment your audience, is to cut down on the total amount of emails you send out (saving you money and annoying your leads less) while increasing the percentage of leads who click through and consider or purchase your product. Segmentation gets refined every time you use it: when you send three emails tailored to particular subgroups and one group has triple the clickthrough and purchase rates of the other two, that is the time to start thinking about how to get more leads in that subcategory, and how can we reach the other groups with such an effective message just for them?

Excellent digital marketing teams like Intero Digital have experience helping you use the data you have and leverage further data collection to get to the heart of your target audience. We help you refine who your customer base is, since there may be untapped markets your messages haven’t appeal to in the past. Audience segmentation is just one tool that Intero Digital uses to help you reach your perfect customer and wow them with your products and services. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help with your digital marketing needs.