If you want to understand your customers better, you need to segment them into different groups based on their needs, preferences, and behaviors. But how do you divide your online and offline audiences? Are they the same or different? How do you reach them effectively? In this article, you will learn some tips and methods to answer these questions and improve your market research skills.
Segmenting your online and offline audiences can help you tailor your marketing strategies, products, and services to each group. You can also identify new opportunities, optimize your budget, and increase your customer satisfaction and loyalty. By knowing who your online and offline customers are, what they want, and how they behave, you can communicate with them more effectively and create value for them.
Identifying and categorizing online and offline audiences is essential for achieving your goals, and there are many ways to do this depending on your resources and data sources. Demographic segmentation, which is based on basic characteristics such as age, gender, income, education, location, etc., can be obtained from surveys, census data, or analytics tools. Psychographic segmentation is based on psychological factors such as personality, values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles, etc., and can be gathered from interviews, focus groups, or social media analysis. Lastly, behavioral segmentation is based on actions and patterns such as purchase history, usage frequency, loyalty, feedback, etc., which can be obtained from transaction data, CRM systems or customer reviews.
The end goal of categorizing someone as an audience is to get their business. I’m my experience, it’s always smart to study your existing customers. I categorized the audience in three brackets. 1. Loyal and happy customers 2. Flakey customers 3. Churned customers Best idea is to interview a few from each category with different businesses, demographics, buying patterns and loyalty. This provides you with the real buying motivations and what makes them tick! That’s how you find the ‘charged words’ and what they hold dear. The ultimate logic is people buy from people/companies they like (ultra branded and hyped products are and exception)
Once you have identified and segmented your online and offline audiences, you need to compare them and see how they differ or overlap. Cross-tabulation is a simple way to compare two or more variables across different segments, which can be displayed in tables, charts, or graphs. For a more advanced analysis, you can use cluster analysis to group similar segments based on multiple variables with the help of statistical software or algorithms. Persona creation is also an effective way to represent your segments as fictional characters with names, photos, backgrounds, goals, challenges, etc. Storytelling and visualization tools can be used to make the personas more realistic and relatable.
After you have compared your online and offline audiences, you need to target them with appropriate marketing strategies, products, and services. To do this, you should consider channel selection to choose the best way to reach your segments, content creation to create relevant and engaging content for your segments, and personalization to customize your content and offers for your segments. Channel selection could include email, social media, websites, blogs, podcasts for online channels, and TV, radio, print, events, direct mail for offline channels. Content creation could include text, images, videos, audio, infographics for online content and brochures, flyers, posters, banners for offline content. Personalization could be based on segmentation tools, CRM systems or AI platforms to personalize your online and offline interactions.
To measure the effectiveness of your segmentation and targeting efforts for online and offline audiences, you can use various metrics and methods. Online metrics are quantitative indicators such as traffic, conversions, bounce rate, and click-through rate. These can be tracked and analyzed with analytics tools, dashboards, or reports. Offline metrics are qualitative indicators like brand awareness or customer satisfaction. These can be collected and evaluated through surveys, interviews, focus groups, or observation. Additionally, you can calculate your ROI to compare the costs and benefits of your online and offline marketing activities and optimize your budget using formulas, calculators, or models.
Often times they can be the same for many categories. You need to address them clearly with appropriate content...either be it online or offline. Especially, when they tend to do research online before a purchase...one example being cars.