How to do audience segmentation to target the right customers

Social media messages bombard users daily with both relevant and completely irrelevant content. This often leads to a digital ennui that causes users—your future customers—to ignore all messaging they might see, assuming it won’t be relevant to their interests. But there’s a way to cut through the digital noise and truly connect with these potential customers: audience segmentation.

What is audience segmentation?

Audience segmentation is the act of breaking your target audience down into smaller groups with similar interests, demographics, and/or psychographics. As a result, you and your team can work to create messaging that truly speaks to these audiences and hopefully leads to sales. 

This tactic can also result in more accurately pinpointing your most likely buyer or customer, allowing you to shape the message toward a desired consumer action. It can also help you understand who not to target with your messaging. There are some segments of the population who simply aren’t your target, no matter how much you might want them to be. Audience segmentation gives you the data to back up your approach to truly going after the prospects that will impact your bottom line.

How to do audience segmentation the right way

Audience segmentation is a complicated process, as most processes are when a lot of data is involved. Therefore, it’s important to break your audience segmentation down into smaller steps with actionable goals to achieve results.

1. Define your target audience segments

This is the first step for a reason. By clearly defining your audience segments, you’ll more accurately locate and market to the customers who are most likely to buy. This will also pare down your target audience so that you can work with manageable audience types and create targeted quality content.

It’s most common to use readily available identifiers to define your target audience. Common criteria to use are:

• Demographics such as age, household income, gender, and location
• Behaviors like commonly used search terms or past purchase behavior
• Interests such as hobbies, fandoms, sports, etc.
• Psychographics such as opinions, lifestyle choices, and personal beliefs
• Previous engagement like frequent buyers, occasional buyers, or browsers

2. Select the right criteria to differentiate your audience

As you begin to look at your audience data, patterns will begin to emerge that will help you further segment your audience. Common age ranges, occupations, locations, interests, etc. will give you and your company a guide to further defining the most impactful audience segments. 

Honing in on these segments and their different criteria is the first step toward creating marketing messages that truly speak to them.

3. Gather customer data

It’s quite possible that you don’t feel you have enough specific data on your customers to do much more than separate them by demographics. This is normal for many companies, as demographic information is usually the easiest to obtain. To understand your customers on a more personal level, consider sending out customer surveys or working with a third-party agency to survey possible audience types. 

4. Map chosen criteria to your marketing platform

Depending on which platform you use to disseminate your different messages, you may need to adjust your chosen audience segments. For example, Facebook uses generation to define age among its target audience segments. This is a minor change in the grand scheme of your messaging, but it’s important to understand how each platform works so that your message truly remains targeted at the right audience.

5. Create your target audience messaging

Now that you’ve done your audience segmentation, you can create the right messages to appeal to each audience. This includes taking into consideration the right platform to use for each segment, as well as the right type of media to use for maximum impact. Some of your audiences will respond very well to targeted Facebook ads, while others might be better served with an email. A large part of successful audience segmentation is how you deliver the message.

A third-party agency like Lytics can map this audience segmentation data directly to the appropriate business tools that result in success. Instead of manually entering the information into each interface, Lytics uses integrations with major players like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and email platforms to build your audience segments in a flash.

Successful audience segmentation changes the game

Knowing how to conduct audience segmentation successfully is a key aspect of your marketing that directly impacts your business and bottom line. Providing targeted messages to your audience segments is even more important as digital messaging continues to overwhelm users every day. 

Reach out to Lytics today to learn how you can easily segment your audience and get the right insights to boost your marketing ROI. Start with a free trial or set up a 30-minute demo to find out more.