Demographic segmentation allows marketers to break up their audience by elements such as age, race, gender, income and education. There are many advantages to breaking your customers into groups, including a more personalized approach to advertising.
In the 2019 eMarketer Customer Experience report, researchers found companies invest more in audience research than ever before. Audience insight is something that around 80% of U.S. companies plan to spend more money on in the future. Although we live in a time when advertising is pinpointed to a specific audience, if you don’t utilize the information available, you can spend a lot of money without seeing any results.
Integrating audience insight into a digital marketing campaign makes more sense than just throwing promotions out and hoping something sticks. There are some specific ways you can benefit from detailed user data and send out segmented campaigns. Beginner marketers find it easier to target niche audiences than juggling a lot of plates at once.
1. Create Stronger Customer Loyalty
When your audience feels as though you understand them, they’re much more likely to buy from you again. They’ll also tell their family and friends about you and help increase your word-of-mouth marketing. Segmenting your audience allows you to create exact buyer personas and gear campaigns to solving the pain points each segment suffers from.
Wouldn’t you be more likely to buy from a business that presented a solution to your problem? Not only would you feel they were on the same wavelength, but also that they’d thought through how best to help you.
2. Target Efforts
Divided audiences also allow you to target specific efforts to grow or reach new areas. If you use business mapping, you may discover your competitor isn’t serving a particular age range in a specific neighborhood in your community. By breaking those people into their own list, you can offer them deals to bring them on board. You can repeat these efforts based on your knowledge of what other businesses like yours are doing.
3. Improve Your Products
Having smaller groups of customers allows you to figure out their needs. You can always poll each segment and gather information on new products they’d like to see you offer or ways to improve current offerings. When you develop that one-on-one relationship that segmentation allows, you’ll better understand how to solve the problems they face. Your products get better, your offers get more specific and you’ll know which new arrivals they’ll care most about.
4. Know Where to Advertise
Having additional information about your users allows you to figure out where they’re most likely to hang out online. For example, if you break your audience into segments and work on reaching young moms between the ages of 25 and 35, you might head over to Pinterest for some of your marketing needs. The platform is likely to have women seeking out information, so figuring out where to advertise also guides your content creation strategy.
5. Combine With Behaviors and Psychographics
Demographics allow you to gather general information about your users. Still, if you want to tap into your users on an emotional level, you must also study their behaviors and the psychology behind why they do what they do. One person in your segmented group may not respond the way another will. Understanding the psychology behind actions allows you to tap into the emotions the buyers experience and present marketing campaigns that hit home with your target audience.
6. Make Sense of Your Personalization
You can personalize an email by adding the person’s first name to the salutation. That doesn’t mean the topic is one that the person cares about. When you segment your audience, you suddenly make the message much more on-point. You can now greet by the first name and send an offer the person is likely interested in. Segmentation adds to the level of one-on-one attention. The more information you have about each grouping, the more likely it is you’ll create a message that resonates.
7. Optimize Your Site UX
Dividing your audience also allows you to improve the user experience (UX) of your site and the customer experience (CX) of your brand. How? You create separate landing pages for each individual group of customers.
Each landing page speaks to a specific segment and reaches them on an emotional level. If one part is mostly millennials, you might use bright, hip colors and focus on topics the generation cares about. On the other hand, if another portion of your customer list is senior citizens, they might care more about your guarantees and appreciate traditional colors.
8. Focus on Changing Trends
When you divide your audience up by demographics, you can spot trends impacting a specific group and make adjustments. For example, if you separate your audience by age, you might notice that some law is affecting millennials and their ability to buy a new home. If you understand the things your demographic deals with, you’re better able to target your marketing to their needs.
You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone
It’s impossible to contact every single person in the world and offer them specifically what they need. However, you can reach a very targeted group and get to know them on a deeper level. Create your selling points based on data gathered about individual groups of customers. Segmentation is one of the most powerful tools marketers have at their disposal, and you can combine the use of demographics with other research to flesh out your buyer persona even more.
Feel free to contact us if you are looking for help with your marketing campaign.
