Audience segmentation
Generic messaging and stock images fall flat online. Consumers have learned how to shut out the noise. They ignore ads and scroll past posts that aren’t eye-catching or interesting. Brands that want to stand out from the crowd and achieve relevance in the minds of consumers need to find effective ways to connect—to create messaging and content that pulls users in. Audience segmentation helps brands do this.
By dividing their audience into segments for research and targeting, organizations can determine the most effective strategy to reach and engage people—to deliver content that’s interesting and relevant to them on the channels they use most. Brands can design products, services, and campaigns that appeal to their audience, tailoring messaging and content to suit the preferences, desires, and interests of their target group.
How organizations use audience segmentation
Audience segmentation is the process by which organizations divide an audience, for example, followers on Twitter or users of their app, into smaller groups of people who share certain characteristics, behaviors, and/or needs. Firms can segment audiences according to the criteria most appropriate for their goals. Through the process of selecting relevant criteria, firms will be able to better understand the demands and preferences of target groups—or what makes them truly unique and valuable to their business.
Audience segmentation is a crucial first step in analyzing customer behavior and figuring out what distinguishes your customers or any other type of target audience from other groups. Companies can use internal data from their databases and CRM systems as well as external data gathered from social sources using social media listening software. By analyzing this data, they can then obtain the audience insights they need to:
- Develop marketing campaigns and messaging that cater to the specific needs and interests of an audience
- Create buyer personas for targeting in order to decide on the best channels and times to deliver content
- Refine their product positioning by highlighting the benefits that matter most to a valuable audience
- Identify and collaborate with the influencers and brands with which their audience has an affinity
Audience segmentation how-to
To segment your audiences, you’ll want to begin by defining your objectives. Are you trying to market a new product to existing customers? Or groups that share similar characteristics with your customer base? Or your competitors’ followers on Twitter? Once you have your goal in mind, you can carry out an audience analysis to identify the common characteristics of a certain group, which may be your customer base, subscribers to a mailing list, or another group about which you are able to collect data.
You can work with data from your databases and CRM systems and/or from surveys or feedback forms to gather information about your target group. Or you could use an audience insights tool, which can help you quickly and easily discover the socio-demographic and behavioral characteristics of a group. You can then segment your audience based on demographic criteria, psychographic variables, behavioral patterns, level of engagement with your brand, hobbies, preferred brands,, and/or other criteria suitable for your particular goal.
Simplify audience segmentation with an audience insights tool
An audience insights tool makes audience segmentation easier by providing you with an explorable persona, or a lookalike profile, which is meant to show you the shared characteristics that distinguish your audience from other groups. You can use this persona for market research and for determining your criteria for audience segmentation. Once you’ve explored and segmented your audiences, you can then define buyer personas, which can be used to inform your marketing strategy. Buyer personas help you visualize your target audience, create messaging and content that will capture their attention, and deliver your message on the channels and platforms they use most.
In this way, you can use audience insight tools and audience segmentation to streamline your communications, increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, and boost your marketing ROI. When used with social listening software, you can even analyze conversations on social media to find out what topics, keywords, and types of content your audience is most interested in.
Understand your audiences in detail with Synthesio Profiler
Synthesio Profiler is an easy-to-use yet powerful audience insights tool enabling smart, data-driven audience segmentation. With Profiler, you can view detailed personas for the groups you want to investigate, understand, and connect with. Using up-to-date and in-depth data from billions of users across the world, Profiler shows you the who (socio-demographics), why (psychographics), and what (behavioral habits) of your audience. Explore your audience’s interests and hobbies, see the brands and products they use, and get other actionable insights you can use to define and target audiences for marketing, PR, sales, and more. Streamline communications efforts while expanding your reach.
And with Synthesio’s Social Intelligence Suite, you can also leverage social listening and trend analysis tools, to regularly take the pulse of your audience and detect emerging trends, critical information that can help you protect your brand reputation and even lead the conversation when an opportunity arises.
How Paprika Uses Audience Insights to Help Clients Develop Their Brand Strategy
“Profiler is the starting point for data based brand strategies. We use it to help our clients understand their environment and better know their customers, but also to brief the creative and marketing teams so that they can build content that will really meet the needs of the audience.”
