Digital marketing is about reaching audiences with a specific message and creating content that engages the target users. Knowing what group of people will consume your content is essential for copywriters, social media managers, PPC experts, and other marketing experts working on content marketing and business promotion strategies. How do you know your content and personalized message will appeal to your target users? That’s when audience segmentation comes in.
What Is Audience Segmentation?
Audience segmentation divides audiences into groups based on their shared interests and similarities. It’s a technique marketers use to divide a large audience into smaller subgroups to deliver more personalized messages, boost customer engagement, and establish stronger connections. Depending on a business project’s specifications, the criteria for specifying subgroups can be diverse based on demographics, interests, user behavior, etc.
The concept of audience segmentation is not new. Brands worldwide have adopted the idea of creating unique marketing materials for different user groups. However, mastering marketing segmentation perks is more important today than ever before.
On the modern web, every user can choose what type of content they’d like to consume and where to look for the needed information. If the content one brand shares doesn’t appeal to them, they can easily find relevant information on the competitor’s website.
The competition is getting fierce. The quality and trustworthiness of content are crucial factors impacting customers’ decision-making. The one-size-fits-all rule is not relevant anymore. Today, one should deliver personalized, targeted messages based on client’s unique preferences and behaviors.
Benefits of Marketing Audience Segmentation
The importance of segmenting your target audience shouldn’t be underestimated. Rather than creating a single message and sharing it with all groups of users, working on copies that resonate with different segments of users proves to be more effective. A user is more likely to engage with the brand once a message is written just for them.
Implementing audience segmentation in your marketing strategy brings many advantages to your projects, including the following:
- You can deliver more personalized content to different audience segments based on their interests, needs, and behaviors. Enhanced content personalization results in a more engaging user experience, enhanced loyalty, increased time spent on your website, etc.
- Audience segmentation ensures more precise ad targeting. You can enhance user experience and generate more revenue from ads by delivering more relevant advertising to your audience.
- Understanding different segments of users can result in a tailored approach to delivering content to every client, which can result in improved conversion rates (whether it’s a signup, product purchase, or membership enrollment).
- Marketing teams can effectively identify the most valuable segments with the biggest growth potential, resulting in a more efficient resource allocation.
- The last but not least valuable point is enhanced user experience and customer satisfaction. Showing content and ads that align with each segment’s interests makes users feel valued, leading to increased loyalty and higher customer satisfaction rates.
Audience segmentation is important, not pure words. The benefits are confirmed by a Single Grain study that found that campaigns with unique content for different personas had a 14.31% higher open rate than non-segmented campaigns. That’s a significant difference!
How to Use Audience Segmentation for Inbound Marketing
Segmenting the audience into smaller groups is especially beneficial for inbound marketing. The latter prioritizes content creation and delivering content that resonates with the audience. Using audience segmentation, businesses can convert prospects into customers by delivering more personalized marketing campaigns by taking such basic steps as:
- Identifying the segments of users you will target with your content (it involves defining the target audience’s age group, gender, geographic location, and preferences).
- Creating content that will appeal to the targeted segment of users.
- Delivering content through platforms popular among users in the specified segment.
By adopting such marketing efforts, companies ensure they meet the preferences of each audience segment by delivering content through the platforms that resonate with the target audience when each segment is most likely to be online.
Such an approach optimizes the company’s marketing spending, increasing the chances of a conversion and enhancing the overall effectiveness of their inbound marketing strategy.
Approaches to Audience Segmentation
Now that we have discussed the basics and defined the key benefits of segmenting your target audience into smaller groups let’s discuss approaches. There are four major audience segmentation models you can follow. By examining each of them in detail, you will notice they answer the four major questions—who, what, where, and why.
Who?
This approach refers to demographic segmentation. It covers essential data about your audience, including age, gender, ethnicity, education, and income level. Demographic segmentation can be especially useful in content marketing, e.g., creating separate content for younger audiences and another for older generations.
Why?
It commonly refers to psychographic segmentation. This approach answers why a certain group of users is attracted to your brand. This model emphasizes character traits, focusing primarily on hobbies, goals, lifestyle, and values. An example of applying this approach would be developing content strategies for those who enjoy playing outdoor games versus those who prefer spending time indoors.
How?
This approach to audience segmentation involves defining user behaviors, spending habits, browsing behavior, interactions with the brand, etc. One of the best ways to apply this approach in practice is to create content based on the likelihood of engagement. For example, consider a marketing strategy for users who are only testing the waters and those who have spent a lot on your brand.
Where?
The concept refers to geographic segmentation based on location. You can create content and target user groups in a specific city, state, or country or even target the audience segment based on their postal code.
How to Plan Your Audience Segmentation Strategy
Whenever it comes to digital marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all rule. Every business is unique, as well as the audiences they target. The plan listed below comes with five steps your company can take to segment your audience properly and develop a content marketing strategy that will keep users engaged, help you boost conversions, and achieve other goals your project aims for.
Step 1: Define Your Segmentation Strategy
Start by clearly outlining what you hope to achieve with segmentation. Your objectives, whether increasing engagement, boosting subscriptions, personalizing content, or enhancing ad revenue, will direct your efforts. Assess the tools, data, and resources available, such as analytics platforms, CRM software, and audience data sources.
Step 2: Establish Clear Goals
Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. For instance, we aim to increase engagement among 18-25 year-olds by 20% over the next quarter. Ensure these goals align with your overall business objectives, like expanding into new markets or improving user satisfaction.
Step 3: Gain Insight into Your Audience
Utilize analytics tools, surveys, and social media interactions to collect data on your audience’s behaviors, preferences, and demographics. Analyze how different segments engage with your content to understand their preferences and pain points. From this analysis, develop detailed audience personas that represent the various segments within your audience.
Step 4: Choose Appropriate Segmentation Criteria
Depending on your goals, select relevant segmentation criteria. For content personalization, consider user behavior and preferences. For geographic targeting, focus on location. Effective strategies often integrate demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral data to create precise audience segments. Test different criteria to determine which provide the most valuable insights and align with your objectives. Be prepared to adjust your criteria based on their effectiveness.
Step 5: Execute Your Segmentation Strategy
After planning and identifying your audience segments, implement targeted campaigns or content strategies for each segment. Continuously monitor performance to assess how well your segmentation achieves your goals. Remember, audience segmentation is an ongoing process that requires regular refinement and optimization to stay in tune with audience behaviors and market trends.
Over to You
Mastering audience segmentation techniques is inevitable for every person engaged in digital marketing. It’s especially important for content creators, social media, and PPC experts. Start by exploring your entire audience and understanding their behaviors and preferences. If you are launching a new online venture, create buyer personas and stick to their characteristics when creating segments of your audience.
