As marketers, nothing is more important than interacting with your target market. We’ve discussed ways to identify, interact with and grow a specified target market and communicate with an interactive audience, but the next step, segmenting the audience, is just as important. Segmentation ensures your content and outreach are relevant to your prospects and clients.

What is Segmentation and Why Does it Matter?

Segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into smaller groups based on specified characteristics. Segmentation allows for more targeted campaigns that create meaningful interaction. Precisely reaching prospects and clients with messages that address their specific needs is more than a recommendation—it’s a critical initiative. In fact, 83% of companies use at least basic segmentation for their email campaigns.

Some areas of segmentation are straightforward, while others require more nuanced research. Criteria to determine segments include:

• Demographic criteria, such as age, location, gender, ethnicity, education, professional role or stakeholder level.
• Psychographic criteria, such as needs, priorities, values, beliefs and interests.
• Behavioral criteria, such as purchasing habits, customer loyalty, usage habits, click and heat mapping, buyer journey stage, occasion or timing.
• Company criteria (also known as firmographic criteria), such as industry, company size, budget and business performance.

How to Use Segmentation

Once segments are defined, identify and group customer profiles with common needs. From there, create targeted messaging that directly resonates with your audience’s priorities. Here are a few powerful ways to use segmentation:

1. Email campaigns. This is one of the most common initiatives that benefit from segmentation. Since emails are sent directly to individuals, content is much easier to personalize. Create a segmented list of your clients and their common needs to support a customer retention strategy. Utilize personalized outreach for qualified leads based on their industry and common needs. The fact is recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns.
2. Content marketing  Whether you maintain a blog, seek editorial coverage, produce e-books, white papers or other customer-centric content, meaningful and relevant content positions you and your company as a respected expert in your field. Use content to explore the psychographic trends of your target market more thoroughly. By analyzing views and downloads, you can discover the top challenges, priorities and values of your prospects and customers. From there, develop more content that addresses those topics. Furthermore, use segmentation to distribute your content via the most appropriate platforms and the prospects who’d benefit most.
3. Advertising. By segmenting your target market, you can identify common locations, websites, groups or social media platforms where your qualified leads congregate. Furthermore, behavioral segmentation allows you to see what advertising content creates the highest interaction and which goes unclicked. Segmented advertising that addresses shared interests and qualities can greatly increase engagement compared to a “spray and pray” approach.

Research, Review and Revise

After you’ve conducted your preliminary market research, determine the most relevant ways to segment your audience. Then research for further market understanding, and design campaigns that capitalize on the trends your research uncovered. It’s important to record and analyze the impact and engagement of your campaigns to further define your buyers’ personas. Marketing requires continual refinement, so consistently review and revise your strategy to maintain marketing segmentation that produces results.