How and Why to Segment Your Target Audience

Business audiences are rarely uniform, especially if it is an audience of many thousands. Customers differ in age, buying methods, and interests, so making the same offer for everyone is inefficient. Segmentation of the target audience (dividing into groups) is a step towards personalization, insights for the development of new products and services, as well as the success of advertising campaigns that become more targeted.
What is target audience segmentation
Why does your business need customer segmentation:
How to segment your customers
Segmentation steps
- Goal setting and hypotheses. Decide what result you want to get / what needs to be revealed as a result of segmentation.
- Define segmentation criteria.
- Divide the audience into segments based on the data collected from analytics.
- Analyze the received segments and draw conclusions. Determine what you can offer to each group of customers.
- Write a strategy and action plan for the groups. At this step, the company decides with which segments and how to work: perhaps some should be prioritized, while others should be completely removed.
Types of segmentation
Here are the criteria for defining segments:
- Socio-demographic. Demographic data includes statistical information, like a person’s age, income, gender, education, etc.
- Geographic. Includes the client's place of residence: country, region, locality. It is also important to consider the characteristics of the place: climate, natural disasters.
- Behavioral. How often and in what way the client buys, readiness to buy, feedback and ratings for products, behavior on the website.
- Psychographic. This can include personality variables like ways of self-expression, values, sociability, attitude to the new, lifestyles, attitudes, likes, and dislikes.
Here are other segmentation criteria:
- Business criteria. Describes the income, size, industry of the company (for B2B).
- Generation theories. Baby Boomers, Generations X, Y, Z, and Alpha.
- Life stage. For example, having a child, getting married, graduating from university.
- Seasonal activity. When purchases are made during a certain period. For example, buyers choose seeds before the summer season.
Ben Hunt’s Customer Awareness Ladder
The idea behind the model is that a customer comes to a purchase through five consecutive steps.
The 5 Ws of audience segmentation
It is much more efficient to combine different criteria and segmentation methods, rather than one. There is no universal set of characteristics for segments, so each business chooses the best for itself. Think right away what a segment is for your business.What is the size of each group, how detailed you describe it, and on the basis of what characteristics do you divide the audience.
- surveys on the website and in social networks;
- email database;
- analytics systems;
- social media statistics;
- feedback analysis.
How to evaluate segmentation results
First, we check the segments for:
- Stability. Groups should remain unchanged for the next few years (according to forecasts);
- The possibility of communication. The audience is available in one or more channels;
- Uniformity. Within the group, customers are as similar as possible and very different from other segments.
What awaits a business without segmentation
Incorrect audience definition results in wasted advertising campaigns and, possibly, minimal effect from them. If you show all customers the same offer, only some will respond, and the rest will not buy. It can take a long time to test options for ads without segmentation, and each attempt is an additional expense that is not always paid off.
Examples of segmentation
The 5 Ws of audience segmentation
Ben Hunt’s Customer Awareness Ladder
Summary
Target audience segmentation is a grouping of customers according to similar characteristics: gender, age, interests, frequency of purchases, readiness to place an order, and others. The division into segments gives ideas for business development and increases loyalty, competitiveness, and the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Usually the audience is segmented according to socio-demographic, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic characteristics. But it is also possible to use alternative approaches or combine several methods. For example, there are such methods as Ben Hunt’s Customer Awareness Ladder or a 5W model. Without dividing customers into groups, the business works blindly and loses money on testing advertising campaigns. It cannot personalize the offer. However, proper segmentation saves the marketing budget and leads to an increase in marketing performance and sales.
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