Audience Segmentation: What Do I Really Need to Know?

Modern marketing operations have greater access to data than ever before, and many advertisers are using this data very successfully. The data market is growing more rapidly than ever, allowing companies in all industries to leverage their access to this data in order to deliver a better, more personalized customer experience. 

Audience segmentation, or dividing your company’s market into different groups based upon common characteristics, is one way to achieve this type of effective personalization. And as data collection and analysis capabilities continue to evolve, audience segmentation is becoming a much more dynamic process. The data continues to refine the audience segments and inform the discovery of new segments. 

Segmenting Your Customer Groups

Audience segmentation relies on the ability to identify subgroups within your entire pool of customers and potential customers in order to deliver a tailored message that will strongly resonate with them. 

This segmentation can also help marketers to identify which types of strategies will work best within the different segments. The sum of these efforts often results in the ability to build deeper customer loyalties between brands and customers. 

Audience segments are created within four different categories that share similar characteristics. These categories are geographical, behavioral, psychographic, and demographic. Within these major umbrellas, audience segments can be further refined. 

For instance, within the demographic category, segments may be created upon similarities in age, gender, income, family structure, education, or ethnicity, among other traits. 

Once the segments are identified and a campaign has begun, it is still crucial to continue analyzing the data to determine how to better refine or redefine the segments in order to continue increasing efficacy. Data can also be collected from social media and other analytics tools if you would like to demo a campaign or test customer impressions of certain messages or products.

The Customer Profile

There are many formulas or templates for creating customer profiles, although nearly all of them contain certain key actions, including:

• Understanding the current perceptions of your company.
• Identifying your most important revenue stream.
• Identifying your best customers.
• Analyzing the data of your best customers and identifying commonalities.
• Creating profiles from the commonalities within your best customers.
• Prioritizing these segments.
• Continuing to analyze the data for emerging trends that can be used to define new segments or redefine existing ones.

The process of creating customer profiles is not a static one. It is constantly changing and evolving based upon changes in consumer preferences and buyer attitudes, as well as changes in data analysis capabilities. 

Creating content with these distinct groups in mind will draw in more interest and help to create lasting, positive images of your company among consumers. Everyone wants to interact with another party who recognizes them as the unique beings that they are. 

While you may never know the specific details of every single customer, understanding some of their traits will definitely create greater customer affinity. The ability to do this successfully will become an increasingly important strategy in staying ahead of the competition as data becomes more accessible and easy to analyze.