The Purpose of Audience Segments

We talk a lot with our clients about the importance of knowing and speaking to their target audience. Understanding your audience allows you to customize your messaging to focus on what is important to your target audience. Audience segmentation is a way to divide your overall audience into subgroups of users that may have different intentions, needs, and interests.

Audience segmentation is simply the act of grouping your customer base into separate segments by shared qualities or characteristics in order to further customize and target your messaging to a specific subset of people. Target audience segmentation can be based on a number of different characteristics including demographic information, behavior metrics that shape our understanding of the audience’s propensity to buy, or more subjective qualities like interests or preferences.

Market Segmentation Strategy

A market segmentation strategy is accomplished by following several steps.

1. Gather data on your audience through a combination of demographic, behavioral, and preference characteristics.
2. Group your audience by shared characteristics.
3. Develop targeted messaging utilizing your knowledge of the audience’s needs, desires, and behavior patterns.
4. Build loyalty through a shared relationship by demonstrating knowledge of your audience’s goals and offering solutions to drive conversions.
5. Test and adapt messaging through audience personas that continually evolve over time.

Gathering the data is the first step in creating an audience segmentation strategy. Consider the following data points as connections or shared characteristics you could utilize in your audience segments :

Demographic Segmentation

• Geographic Area
• Age
• Gender identity
• Ethnicity
• Income
• Level of formal education

Behavior Segmentation

• Purchase history
• Navigation within a site
• Form fill or contact request

Personality Characteristics

• Values
• Attitudes
• Beliefs

Demographic and geographic segmentation can be achieved through gathering data in tools like AdRoll, Google, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo Gemini, and a few other platforms. Behavioral-based targeting is constantly improving as each platform improves its segmentation abilities. Additional contextual information can be gained in other ways including tactics like user surveys or focus groups and used to develop an audience persona.

Create segments based on grouping your target audience by shared characteristics, then consider the needs, desires, and considerations each of these segments is likely to associate with. This will help shape an audience persona for the targeted segment.

Persona Development

An audience persona gives a name and a face to a general member of a segment group. Persona development allows marketers to speak directly to a person, even if that person is fictional. Understanding behavior analytics can be achieved through audience analysis and help you develop messaging that hits the right target audience at the right time.

Target Your Audience with Custom Messaging

Once you have a firm understanding of your audience segments and their needs you can custom tailor your content to anticipate their needs and preemptively provide solutions to their issues. Tailored and targeted messaging to an audience that’s more likely to be receptive is significantly more effective than a one-size-fits-all approach.