Today, the market of various offers is so large that preparing a product and simply waiting for sales is a bad strategy. The results of the research of Website Builder show that segmentation and individual offers for small groups of people with the same requests increase sales 18 times more than those aimed at a wide audience. If you don’t know your target audience, promoting any (even the most hyped product) will be many times more difficult. In order to interest potential customers, you need to know their needs and interests. Then your ad will always hit the spot. We understand how to find your target audience and segment it. Segmentation – dividing the audience into separate groups with the same interests. There are many ways to segment the audience: by geolocation, by age, budget, lifestyle.
Target audience – a group of people who are potentially interested in your offer (more than other people). To communicate with customers properly, it is important to understand their values and preferences. If you want to choose the right channels for promotion and rationally use the budget – make a portrait of your target audience. It is important to remember that people interested in the same product can be further divided into subgroups by location, gender, age – which will also affect the approaches to promoting the offer. In a nutshell, this is the segmentation of the target audience.a
Segmentation is the division of current and potential customers into groups based on similar characteristics. For example, by age, gender, personal, socio-economic and other characteristics. Segmentation has a lot in common with the image of the buyer: the more information you know about the audience, the easier it is to understand it. In addition, thanks to the division of customers into subgroups, you can:
1.Increase loyalty
Qualitative segmentation helps to identify the needs of the audience. A client who feels that his interests are understood begins to trust you more. This allows you to increase sales: users will come to you again and again.
2.Speed of marketing
Segmentation will save you a lot of testing costs, although it will not eliminate them 100%, because no experience exempts from the need to do split tests. If you know which audience to target, you can significantly save your budget.
3.Choose the right communication channel
When you understand who you want to offer the product to, it will be easier to decide which channel to use. For example, if we talk about the difference between generations, we will see that people over 50 watch TV more often than launch TikTok, and teenagers are more likely to read a feed on social networks than a newspaper.
4.Increase the effectiveness of the advertising campaign
If you set up advertising for everyone at once, there is a great chance to make a mistake and not get into the interests of customers (and drain the budget, but more on that later). With the right segmentation, promotion will become fast and effective. You no longer have to spend time and money to get into the audience’s request. Now you can offer the right product to interested people.
Segmentation by main features
Segmentation by main features – a method that involves the collection and processing of information about the audience. It is important to find out not only the gender, age and location of potential customers, but also their religion, level of education, lifestyle, purchase motives, etc. To make the most complete portrait of the audience, you can use the persona method. In fact, you need to come up with “fictional” characters and give them the characteristics of buyers. Each person will represent a certain group of consumers.
Here are some services you can use to segment your audience:
Wordstat and Google AdWords — will show how many people are looking for the desired product in search engines.
Wordstat — helps to find out in which countries and regions people are looking for a particular product.
Google Analytics — will determine who visits your site.
Google Trends — will show how the frequency of requests changes at different times.
This is a popular method invented by Mark Sherrington (a famous economist and lover of the Japanese philosophy of kaizen). Its main task is to identify separate segments of the audience by similar features and put forward an individual offer for each of them. The model is based on 5 questions that help to better understand the interests and goals of the audience:
What? (What do we sell?) – type of product.
Who? (Who will buy?) – a portrait of a potential client.
Why? (Why buy?) – motivation for buying.
When? (When to buy?) – conditions for purchase.
Where? (Where to buy?) – place of purchase.
If you answer these questions in detail, you will be able to understand to whom and how to offer the product
The method from the reverse
First, determine what the client will get in the end. Then describe the path that a person will take to come to the desired result. Think about what was the motivation to perform these actions. And then analyze which part of the audience might have such a need. With this approach, you can identify several segments of the target audience. To check if your assumptions are correct, you will have to run a limited campaign for each user group.
CustDev
CustDev – an interview with a user. This method helps to understand what product your potential customers need. It allows you to collect valuable ideas and hypotheses to improve the product. The method is suitable for quick testing of ideas. With its help, you can check product positioning, study communication channels and find new user segments. Working with CustDev includes four stages: client identification, verification and attraction, and the final stage – company creation.
The audience can be segmented by a set of features, here are some of them:
By activity
Subscribers are divided into active and inactive:
Active – those who open emails, click on links. You can send them useful content, information about promotions, discounts or new products.
Inactive – those who have not read your letters for a long time. To start working with them, you need to reactivate them: find out which of the subscribers can be made active and which are no longer active.
By geography
This is a popular type of segmentation because the subscriber’s attention can be attracted by specifying the city of residence in the message or ad. It is like addressing by name: contact is established with the user and any offer sounds more personal.
By age and gender
This method will suit those whose range of goods or services is different for female and male audiences, as well as those who have products for different ages.
By preference
Users are people with different interests, this should be taken into account. Pay attention to what products they view and add to the cart, what section of the site they visit most often, what links they follow.
By customer life cycle
The life cycle is the path a person goes through as a customer of the company. At different stages, the user will show interest in different products and services. This type of segmentation allows to improve personalization and make the offer more relevant for each customer.
This is a comprehensive approach that takes into account 3 indicators at once: when the last purchase was made, how often the user makes purchases and what is the volume of these purchases.By combining the data, you can get a number of segments:
Active customers who buy often and a lot.
Prospective customers who are interested in the product but do not make a purchase.
Those who have just started using the services of the company.
Users who rarely visit the site.
Those who have lost interest.
Each of the segments requires a separate approach. For example, the interest of active customers needs to be constantly warmed up, and inactive customers urgently reactivated. Users who throw the goods into the cart and leave the site deserve a separate conversation. In order to convert them, you need “catch-up” campaigns that will remind you of the “items that are missing in the cart” before the person forgets about the offer.