How to Segment Your Target Market
? Andrew Miller (Mounier)
B2B SaaS Growth Architect + Brand Storyteller | Unearthing Powerful Narratives to Drive Growth & Retention | CEO of WordSmiths,Inc.
Every marketeer’s goal is to deliver the right message, at the right time, on the right platform, to the right person. However, very few of us do this properly- or at all. We jump straight into the development of campaigns, get the creative working on graphics, start optimizing and re-doing landing pages, decide what channels we will propagate on, and go down our checklist. After all the boxes have been checked, we launch the campaign and stand confidently as we look at the beautiful work we have done. We created amazing ad copy, we designed engaging visuals, we even got our media partners to mention us… yet, there is no ROI in sight. What did we do wrong?
Segmenting 101
Before you can launch any campaign you have to remember to define your target market. If you create messages without an audience in mind, you are just wasting your time. Without a clearly defined audience, you might as well put on a blindfold, spin around, and then try throwing darts at your target.
Now that you are aware of the importance behind defining your target audience and creating segments, exactly how do you go about it?
Define the goals of your marketing
Ask yourself the following questions: Why are you in business? What is the point behind your marketing efforts (create leads, build brand awareness, answer a specific call to action, etc…)? Define 1-3 specific key performance indicators of success for your next marketing campaign.
Who purchases your product or uses your service
Look at your current customer base. You might think you know who your customers are, but until you actually look at the data, it is very hard to be certain. If you are a larger company I would recommend looking through your CRM, or partnering up with a big data company like Nielsen, who can give you granular insight (if you aren’t familiar with their 66 prizm models I would suggest checking them out).
If you don’t have the funds, resources, or a CRM, then you will need to go through your records manually. If you have a lot of old customer data sitting in an excel spreadsheet, you should probably just take a sample size. Look over your data for the past 1-3 years and organize your customers into multiple groups (I highly recommend not having more than 5 groups).
Determine which groups best summarize your data set. I prefer to mix demographic with psychographic information. However, if you do not have both data sets and it has not been built into your intelligence gathering process, then focus on the information you do have (age, interaction frequency, services or products they purchase, etc…).
Customer Persona Development
Once you have developed 3 to 4 major groups from your customer base then you should begin the development of your customer personas. These are “human profiles” of your groups. A high level overview of how to do this would be to write a story. What does this persona look like? Do they have a family, are they married, what do they do for fun, what are their hopes and dreams? Once you have created your personas, then you have successfully segmented your data set and know who you have in your customer base. Based off of this data, you can determine what group you want to focus on.
Once you know who you want to target, you are ready to jump into the creation of your campaign. Having a defined segment allows you to understand your customers and tailor your marketing strategies to them. This in turn increases your campaign success rate and helps you stay focused in all your efforts.
How do you segment your current customer base? How do you create your customer personas?
I Help B2B Marketing Teams 10X Their Their Productivity
2 年Andrew, thanks for sharing this awesome post ??????
Editor at McClatchy,
10 年good insight input!
SEO Expert & Content Marketing Strategist | Writing for Entrepreneur.com | Driving Results with Social Media & Geofencing Marketing | Experienced Addiction Expert and Business Consultant
10 年Great post Andrew, you bring up such a valid point of what I call, "putting the cart before the horse". I learned this the hard way but am grateful that I did learn it. I definitely need to fine tune it and scale it for larger products but I get the idea. I remember a client that I had who wanted me to design them a new website and manage their SEO. They were a photo studio in Miami. I sat down with them before beginning anything and asked them a series of questions. What was the age of most of their customers, gender, demographic, nationality / race, and sociological status. Because of the answers we were able to design a website that was both effective and profitable for the client. Too many times I talk to clients who want to choose colors and designs based on their personal preferences, This is such a huge mistake leaving aside the few exceptions. Clients need to be educated on these principles you've so masterly covered in this post and it would make things run so much smoother. But the challenges are what make us better. Thanks for inspiring this train of thought and conversation.