There are over 7 billion people on planet earth. As you know, not every one of those people are your business’ customers and they never will be.
Good luck selling baby diapers to a 25-year-old, single man. Best wishes selling discounted theme park tickets to a stationary grandmother.
Coming to terms with the fact that your consumer base has limits and segmenting out/focusing on the target market segmentation groups that you can feasibly succeed with is an important step towards driving growth for your company.
But don’t stop your segmentation efforts at just separating potential customers from impossible ones. Consider taking things even further by segmenting potential buyers into deeper niches and treating each of those groups to different marketing experiences.
Curious to learn more about how you can successfully segment your marketing efforts and maximize your campaign’s efficacy? If you are keep reading!
- Invest in a Tool That’s Capable of Segmenting Your Audience
Manually tracking your consumer segments can get cumbersome, especially as you grow. To make things easier, invest in marketing tools that allow you to seamlessly separate your consumers based on the qualities most important to your company.
Modern email marketing tools are great at segmenting. They allow you to organize users into different groups automatically and share personalized marketing messages with each of them (more on that in a moment).
If you’re not sure where to start with segmenting software, consider exploring Mail Chimp or Constant Contact to get the ball rolling.
- Understand Demography That Matters
There are a nearly unlimited amount of segmentation factors your company can lean on to create effective marketing groups. Gender, age, location, economic status, occupation, etc.
Just because you can though doesn’t mean you should.
For example, if it’s important that your marketing efforts target an Atlanta SEO company, location, and occupation would be two important segmentation qualifiers. Gender would not.
Work with your marketing team to discover which segments have the potential to move the needle for you and start building groups around those factors. Start small and work your way into deeper niches as you find success.
- Don’t Forget About Behavior
Target market segmentation isn’t always about immutable qualities, location, and occupation. Another great point of focus when breaking out groups from your core consumer base is behavior.
For example, consumers that click through your email messages 25% of the time or more might enjoy coupon codes and more frequent contact than people you’re able to convert less than 5% of the time with your marketing messages.
Your marketing segmentation tool should be adept at tracking customer behaviors and relaying statistics that’ll enable your ability to make behavior based segmentation decisions.
- Develop Specific Marketing Campaigns for Each Group
Segmenting your audience just for the sake of segmenting them is a waste of time. The idea should be that once you’ve refined your customers into groups, you will create unique marketing collateral focused on just them so you’ll (hopefully) boost your conversation rates.
With that in mind, before you go down the segmentation rabbit hole, have a strategy in place on how you’ll market to each of the segments you’re interested in targeting.
We appreciate that developing unique marketing plans for various segments takes time. Believe us when we say though that when done right, that time can prove to be lucrative.
- Cross Sample Messaging
Have a marketing campaign that’s working particularly well on one of your market segments? If you do, consider sampling that experience/user journey on a different, albeit related, segment in your database.
Campaigns that are targeted at 18-29-year-olds might work just as well on 30 to 45-year-old customers! You never know until you try so don’t be afraid to expose your audience to new means of contact.
- Take Note of Your Most Engaged Group
If you’re finding that mid-western women ages 18 to 29 are the most engaged group among all of your marketing segments, let that inform your broader business.
Start developing products that are for that purchase-happy 18 to 29-year-old female market. Conduct focus groups to understand why that demo drives so much success for your business.
We’ve seen segmentation data lead to companies taking whole new approaches to how they run their businesses to great avail.
- Resell Your Targeted Data
If ever it makes sense to do so and you have the legal ability, you can sell your targeted data to other companies that are interested in a segment’s attention. The practice of selling targeted data is common, particularly when companies go out of business and can be a great way to further cash in on your segmentation efforts.
The trick to being able to sell segmentation data comes down to how strong the terms of service are on your website. In several jurisdictions, you’ll have to expressly note the possibility of user’s data being resold in order to do it.
Targeted leads can be worth $5+ per email address. Keep that in mind and treat your user data like the valuable asset it is by caring for it well.
Leveraging Target Market Segmentation Will Grow Your Company
Learning how to market is a reason to celebrate. Improving marketing that’s earning you money with segmentation… That’s harder.
As we’ve noted though, the effort is well worth the squeeze as it’s been proven time and again that targeted marketing can improve a company’s SEO strategy, organic social media mentions, and other revenue-driving factors.
Looking to take in more tips on target market segmentation? If you are, we welcome you to explore more of the content we have available on our blog.