What is audience segmentation?
Audience segmentation is a digital marketing strategy that categorizes a business’s audience into subgroups based on factors such as interests, intent to purchase, demographics, and online activity. Using segmentation allows the business to tailor messaging to specific audience segments and thus build stronger connections with current and potential customers.
For example, a sneaker company wants to build awareness of its new running shoe that cushions the heel. In this case, they would create a digital campaign with targeting parameters of runners aged 40 – 65+ whose Google search history and web activity show that they live active lifestyles, suffer from heel pain, and are looking to alleviate it. These ads would be displayed on sites while users are browsing. These ads will address a specific problem these users have and will introduce them to a brand that can solve their problem, thus leading to sales of the new running shoe.
In this article, we will explain: 1) how audience segmentation can drive more leads, 2) how to segment an existing audience and 3) how to keep your audience segments relevant to your business’s goals.
How can audience segmentation be used to drive more leads?
By utilizing audience segmentation, you can pinpoint a niche audience most likely to convert or engage with your businesses’ relevant products and services. This allows you to get in front of your audience in the right place, at the right time, increasing the probability of gaining a sale or lead.
The first step in building a lead-driven audience segment is understanding the ideal customer for the product or service, and then creating a persona based on that ideal customer.
When starting a persona of the ideal customer, ask questions like: where do they live? How old are they? What are their interests? What are their preferences, online behaviors, and wants/needs? Pull this information together into one fictional person to whom you give a name. For example:
Ursula is a 50-year-old woman who lives within 60 miles of Lancaster city, Pennsylvania
Her interests are: running (5ks and half-marathons), fitness, wellness and aging healthfully.
Her recent online activity includes: 1) visits to websites that have information about plantar fasciitis, 2) search history about products to relive plantar fasciitis pain, and 3) visits to sites that have wellness information.
Her recent search terms include: how to heal plantar fasciitis, what causes heel pain, relief from running pain, best running shoes for plantar fasciitis pain.
Her social media follows strength, fitness and health influencers such as: Kendra Jarratt, Chris Freytag and Kelly K Roberts.
Her demographics include: middle to upper income, city or suburban lifestyle, married, children who are in high school or older, home owner.
Developing Ursula’s persona helps the running shoe company understand their target audience for this product and how to reach them.
How do I segment an audience?
Before segmenting an audience, you must decide which platform will display your ads. This depends on your business’s goals. Does your business need conversions such as lead forms or phone calls? Or are you focused primarily on increasing purchases? Does your business need more engagement on your social media posts to build better brand awareness? Or does your business need SEO/SEM assistance to bring more people to your site?
Once you pinpoint your business’s goals, you should decide which digital platform best suits your needs. We recommend utilizing social media platforms for awareness and event-related goals, and Google Ads for e-commerce and lead-driven goals. For more information about campaign targeting based on platform, read our article A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Campaign Targeting
When creating an audience on social media platforms like Facebook, you’ll find it has more limited targeting capabilities than SEM platforms like Google Ads. Facebook will allow you to set your location targeting, age range, and genders, but when you reach the detailed interest targeting, your options become restricted. Facebook has continued to limit detailed interest targeting to avoid the abuse of some targeting options and discrimination. This is why we suggest using social media for broader awareness goals versus purchase-oriented goals, which should have a more niche targeting strategy.
Google Ads allows you to target users very specifically by offering the ability to build a custom-intent-audience (CIA) segment. This allows you the freedom to target people who have searched keywords and browsed sites related to what your business offers. One helpful tool for compiling your list of keywords is Google Ads’ keyword planner. Here you can enter a couple of keywords related to the persona you’d like to target, and Google will provide you with a list of potential keywords related to the ones you initially entered. Of course, Google provides audience segments that have been auto-generated, but if you want to create your own audience segment that matches your custom persona, you will have to do the grunt work of creating a list of keywords/key phrases and URLs for websites that your desired audience is searching.
No matter your business’s goals, you must build an audience segment for a campaign to run efficiently and you must choose the correct platform to achieve those goals.
How can you keep your audience segmentation relevant to your goals?
Now that we understand the thought process behind building an audience segment, we need to keep up with the evolution of our audiences. In the digital world today, viewers and their interests are ever-changing. This means it is crucial that we regularly analyze and measure our audience segment’s success by tracking the performance of the campaign to which the segment is attached.
To measure campaign performance, the key metric to focus on is CTR (click-through rate). This metric shows how well your ads are resonating with the audience. The CTR percentage is the number of clicks gained divided by the number of impressions received. The average CTA is 0.04% for Google display campaigns and 3-4% for Google PPC campaigns. The average CTR for Facebook ads is 1.5%. If your campaign is performing at least twice as well as these basic metrics then it is doing well, and the higher the CTR the better.
If your CTR begins to fall after some time, spruce up your audience segment with new keywords, look for new interest options, and add new websites to your audience list. Stay relevant by being on top of trends and knowing the changes within the platforms you are using. You must continually evolve your audience segment with because audience will continually be evolving its habits as well.
Completing the process of building an audience segment will help your business drive more leads and build stronger connections with your audience. It will also help you as a business owner understand your customers’ evolving wants and needs so that you can accommodate those within your advertising, products, and service.