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Want to know how to group your audience into segments to grow your business?
In this article, we’ll cover the benefits of customer segmentation in PPC, SEO, CRO, content and social media marketing, and how to create customer segments for each.
What is Customer Segmentation?
Customer segmentation (or audience segmentation) is the process of grouping your customers together based on shared characteristics so that you can deliver more tailored messaging and build a stronger connection with them.
Customer segmentation will help you improve your targeting and make the most of your digital marketing campaigns.
What Are the Benefits of Audience Segmentation?
There are many benefits of segmenting your customers.
Audience segmentation allows you to customise and personalise your marketing approach to different types of buyers.
It allows you to communicate unique selling points (USPs) of your product or service powerfully and effectively in a ‘language’ that the receiver welcomes and understands.
Personalised marketing is simply more effective than generic mass marketing.
Below are the benefits of customer segmentation:
- Your marketing communications are better received
People communicate differently. Some use email, others prefer social media. Then there are avid blog readers. Customer segmentation allows you to pick the right channel for each of your audience types. Once you start personalising your marketing, you’ll see a significant increase in engagement and in profits.
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- You spend less money on resources
Audience segmentation allows you to avoid spending money and time on generic campaigns that don’t speak to your target market. If you know the particular motivations of your audience group, you are more likely to support them in achieving their aspirations. As such, you lower the risk of your marketing efforts failing.
- You get the right traffic to the right pages
Audience segmentation allows you to plan effective promotions, development, pricing and marketing strategies by creating a specific customer profile.
- You gain a competitive advantage
You may uncover things about your customers that your competitors don’t know. For example, if one of your identified segments are university students, and you know that it’s almost time to hand in dissertations and take exams, you can send them marketing emails offering them products/services to help them ‘de-stress’ or study.
- You retain and attract the right customers
Rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach, you can target people who you know would love your product/service by targeting your best prospects.
How to Create an Audience Segment
We suggest grouping your audience into these 5 segmentation types:
- A Demographic Segment – these are all of the outward-facing attributes of a user i.e. age, gender, income level, job type, educational level, etc. You can get this data in Google Analytics.
- A Behavioural Segment – these are the actions that your customers take i.e. their online shopping habits, past purchases, the social media sites they visit, or what devices they use. You can get this data in Google Analytics.
- A Psychographic or Attitudinal Segment – these are useful as they give you clues into their wider perceptions, interests, and mindsets i.e. why your customers like or dislike certain brands, their lifestyle choices or values. You can get this data from a heat-mapping platform such as Hotjar. You use heat-maps to conduct user research, and it’s a great way to find out what the humans on your website are/have been thinking, doing, or feeling.
- A Geographic Segment – based on where your target audience is located. You can make this as extensive or exclusive as you’d like, from continent to postcode. You can get this data in Google Analytics.
- Segment by the User Journey – this applies to the user journey people take on your website, from where they first land to where they convert. You can get this data in Google Analytics in the behaviour flow report.
- Segment by keywords – based on search intent and stage of buyer’s journey. Split your audience into those looking for a specific product, searching for additional information, comparing offers, and ready to purchase. Research keywords that fit a particular intent. You can get keyword data from an SEO platform such as SE Ranking keyword generator.
To segment your audience, you need to determine your customer segmentation goals first.
To do that, try answering the following questions:
- What do you want to achieve by segmenting your customers?
- How will audience segmentation help to meet your business goals?
Secondly, segment your customers into groups (one of the segmentation types above) based on your business objectives.
An example:
Let’s say you sell robot vacuum cleaners and you want more students to discover your brand online.
Your Google Analytics data currently shows that 30% of people aged 18-25 buy your product, but your wider industry research proves that this percentage should be around 60%.
Based on the data, you make the assumption that the reason more students don’t currently buy from you is that your marketing isn’t relatable.
So you decide to segment students into buyer personas to learn more about them.
You may see that your current 18-25-year-old buyers are all based in specific geographic locations. They are men who spend a lot of time on Instagram and love travelling.
Once you have enough information about your segment, you can create a relatable blog category, a personalised advertisement campaign specifically aimed at that segment and so on.
Once you’ve created your audience segments, you can start to develop a persona that will provide you with a deeper understanding of your customers’ behaviours and needs.
You can then target and reach your different buyer personas through the appropriate channels.
How Will the Audience Segmentation Help Your Digital Marketing Campaigns?
Audience segmentation splits up your audiences into ‘easier-to-manage’ groups.
Instead of running the same marketing campaign for all your customers, you have more relatable campaigns that are also easier to optimise.
This will help your audience to feel more connected to your brand.
How is Audience Segmentation Used in Digital Marketing?
Once you’ve segmented your audience, and built your buyer personas, it’s important to understand how and where people are consuming your content.
Below we’ve listed the digital marketing channels that we use at Digivate, and provide some insights on how you can use audience segmentation within your PPC, SEO, CRO, content, and social media marketing.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation in PPC
Customer segmentation is so essential in paid search because it helps you to pick the right ad copy, create landing pages, and assist with targeting.
Segmentation can help you directly speak to multiple audiences for the same product or service in your PPC campaigns.
You can segment in paid media by:
- Relevant keywords boost conversions – Determine the intent behind the keywords. Is the person you’re trying to reach looking to inform themselves (informational intent), make a purchase (transactional intent), or find a particular website or webpage (navigational intent)? Once you’ve determined their search intent, you can adjust your bidding strategy to target keywords that will specifically appeal to them.
- Letting users segment themselves will improve user experience – Instead of only using data analysis (i.e. Google Analytics or Google Adwords) to assess the predominant audience of each keyword, you should allow users to segment themselves once they land on your site. A great way to do this is by having clear and immediately apparent options that the user can select on top of the page when they land.
- Proximity targeting can increase sales – If you have a physical location that you want to drive people toward, consider advertising to people based on where they are located and how close they are to you. For example, if you own a local brick-and-mortar store, you can use mobile location services to reach consumers in real-time when they are near your store location or point of interest.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Customers expect a personalised experience when they visit your website.
Using real-time audience segmentation in conjunction with personalisation is a great way to boost traffic and conversions.
Real-time segmentation means instantly tracking a customer’s click patterns the moment they visit your website (we use Hotjar to do it).
These real-time click patterns provide a great indication of what matters to your visitor, which means that you can create a personalised experience through call-to-actions, content, and design.
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Benefits of Audience Segmentation in Content Marketing
There are several ways customer segmentation can be used to propel content marketing.
Below are some of the ways segmentation can benefit your business:
- Targeted content is more effective – As soon as a visitor lands on your site, they should be able to ‘see themselves’. Audience segmentation can help you and your content marketing team to refocus your message and vision for each new customer segment.
- Audience segmentation improves your content strategy – A landing page needs to highlight a series of questions that a visitor may be grappling with and should present a simple solution to their problem (with the solution only partially visible). If you are targeting more than two user segments, ask visitors to enter information about themselves that can help you identify which segment they may fall into i.e. geographic area. That way you can put them on a more effective journey within your site.
Below is an example of how segmentation can be used to create and manage your content:
Need help with a measurable content strategy?
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Benefits of Audience Segmentation in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Once you define your different audience segments, you can customise the experience of those users on your site by providing content that is targeted and suited for that specific group. Which will result in a better user experience.
Google rewards websites that provide a good user experience. So if you are looking for “out of the box” ways to improve your SEO, experimenting with this audience segmentation strategy may be incredibly beneficial.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation in Social Media Advertising
Use customer segmentation to improve the messaging and targeting for social media campaigns by:
- Tailoring your content to the right persona on social media platforms – Target the right groups of people who are more likely to engage with your brand
- Matching your audience segments with the right influencer – Find the right micro or macro influencer(s) that align with your brand.
- Optimising and measuring your targeted content – Ensure that your tailored posts and messaging is seen by the right audience segment using advanced targeting capabilities.
To identify posts that can be optimised, label your posts according to your persona in order to track and compare the effectiveness of your strategy.
If your social media content doesn’t help you to reach your targeted business goals or you’re not sure how to attribute your sales to content marketing, get in touch here or try out a few online digital marketing courses to improve your skillset.
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Summary
Below is a 4-part roadmap to visually show everything that we’ve discussed above and to guide your customer segmentation efforts:
Make sure that you’re continuously measuring customer data to see where people are landing on your website, how long they’re staying, and why they leave.
Then incorporate that data into your next audience segmentation strategy.
We can do that research on your behalf and advise you on the best digital marketing strategy for your business.
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Article by
Matthew Stratford
