Customer segmentation is a major aspect of running a business successfully. If you get it right, you are bound to climb the ladder, else, it’s the other way. It is extremely essential to precisely categorize your target audience into smaller and concise buckets to optimize your marketing strategies. What’s the point of spending huge money on attractive campaigns, if it doesn’t reach the right people? Today, marketers face the challenge of identifying and classifying their customers, and this leads to a dip in the overall business. Each lead has a cost attached to it and can be justified only if marketers can minimize the cost per lead by targeting niche groups of audience. Startup founders find it even more difficult to do this task as they lack the right resources and talent that can be dedicated for this purpose. Hence, it is imperative to have good knowledge about how to appropriately create baskets for your audience and also learn the art of effectively communicating your brand to those baskets. Unless you connect in the correct way with your customers, you may not be able to stay ahead in the game.
So, as a step towards learning customer segmentation, let’s first discover the types of classification. This will make it easier for you to apply these types in your business. Majorly, there are three types of segmentation – Geographic, Demographic and Behavioural.
Let us understand one of the easier-to-comprehend type along with an example to make it more convenient to apply the same to your business model. The name itself suggests that this classification involves segmenting your audience based on location. If you’re selling creamy cupcakes, then you are bound to target a local area where you can find stores that can put your sweet treats up for sale or directly deliver them to your customers. You may not want to target an international audience in this case. You’ll simply be wasting your time, efforts and money in showing your ad to irrelevant people who aren’t your customers.However, if you are a brand that offers software solutions to healthcare, then you are looking at attracting a larger set of audience around the globe. You have to mould your marketing strategy accordingly and appeal to your international customers. Take into account different languages, different currencies and different time zones and optimize your website and campaigns accordingly. So, geographic segmentation is relatively easy to apply if you define your boundaries of operation.
Having figured out what geographic segmentation is, let us go a step beyond and decode the nuances of demographic classification of your audience. In this type, you ought to divide your customers based on certain characteristics that they possess. Some of these features include gender, age, interests, income, educational qualification, religion, marital status, occupation. etc. To understand this type of segmentation better, let us take an example. Let’s imagine you are creating a campaign for women’s footwear from a luxury label, you’d want to target females (gender), aged 22-60 (age), who show interest in fashion or footwear (interest) and who earn greater than INR 5,00,000 (income). In this instance, you’ve covered most of the features that apply to this campaign. This way, you can filter your audience and create a dedicated creative that appeals to and allures this set of customers in the most optimum way. The more you segment your audience, the better will be your targeting and the closer you’ll get to optimising your budget.
This type of segmentation involves some brain racking. This involves categorizing your target audience based on certain patterns that their online behaviour depicts. It may be specific brands that they are loyal to, a purchase pattern that they tend to follow, or a simply a unique manner of using their profile on the social platform in contention. As a wise marketer, you need to keep a close track of your audience and showcase special ads to them to entice them to your site. Let us understand this feature better with a simple example. Let’s suppose you’re on a site that you have already subscribed to; would you not feel bothered if the site showed you another pop-up saying “Subscribe to Us”? A smarter option would be to show him some of your latest happenings or offers and attract him towards taking the next step. This customization can be attained only with deeper understanding of your customer engagement pattern. Behavioural Segmentation enables marketers to be more precise in their communication and connect in the best possible way with their desired set of audience.
Ensure that your ad appears only to the audience you want to show it to. Take control of your campaigns by efficiently applying the above mentioned segmentation. We do understand that doing all of this, along with taking care of your business and its growth could be a herculean task to deliver. That’s where we step in and extend our hand to help you succeed in your endeavours. Why don’t you get in touch with us
here and let us know how we can collaborate together to accelerate your growth in the industry.
