Marketing campaign segmentation

8 min read

As a marketer, you’ll know that sending the right campaigns to the right audience is vital. After all, by providing personalised and tailored content, you’ll be able to truly speak to your audience, rather than sending out blanket offers or campaigns that are unlikely to connect. 

By segmenting your audience, you’ll find it easy to send your customers messages that matter to them, without overwhelming them with ones that don’t. You’ll also be able to employ your resources more effectively and boost your ROI.

With this in mind, let’s take a more detailed look at what the marketing campaign segmentation process involves. In doing so, we’ll cover exactly how to segment your campaigns, why segmentation is so important, and how these segments can be used for personalised marketing. We’ll conclude by showing you how our products can help make your campaign segmentation efforts simple, accurate, and effective.

What is market segmentation?

Market segmentation is the process of dividing your entire audience into smaller groups, known as segments. These segments are groups of customers or prospects who share similar needs, interests, preferences, and characteristics.

Prior to marketing campaign segmentation, marketers used to use the ‘spray and pray’ method of reaching potential customers. This meant that all leads and customers were shown the same campaigns, regardless of their intent and relationship with the brand. However, in the modern world, we now know it’s far more effective for marketers to hone-in on exactly who they want to target. 

How to segment your marketing campaigns

By segmenting your customers, you can build personas for different customer groups. These will help you tailor campaigns, provide the right messages, and include the right promotions. You can segment your customers using:

Socio-demographic data

You can segment customers based on a number of socio-demographic factors, including a customer’s age, gender, income, education, and family status.

Dividing customers into segments based on demographic data is widely popular among marketers. Due to its simplicity, it’s also considered to be a great starting point for campaign segmentation, if you’re new to the concept.

Geographic data

You can also target customers based on a geographic boundary. Depending on the size of your business, this can be done on a city, county, or national basis. Alternatively, you can also segment them based on their distance to a specific location, e.g. anyone within a 20-minute driving distance.  

Segmenting customers in this way is highly useful for certain campaigns, such as if you’re opening a new store (customers in London are likely to have little interest in your new store in Manchester). Similarly, if you run a clothing business, you’ll likely promote different items to people who live in warm climates vs those that live in cold climates.

Psychographic data

The type of lifestyle a person leads can have a huge influence on the marketing activities they’re receptive to. As a result, by analysing your audience’s preferred leisure activities, interests, and opinions, you can maximise the performance of your campaigns.

When segmenting your audience based on psychographic data, you should focus on the intrinsic traits your target customer has. Factors include their values, personalities, interests, attitudes, and motivations.

Behaviour-based data

Similarly, the way that your audience behaves can also influence your marketing activities. By looking at the recency, frequency, and monetary value of their purchases, you can segment your audience into different groups and tailor your content accordingly. There are numerous other ways to segment your customers on behavioural data. Some further examples include: 

• How they use your website (pages visited, length of visit, frequency of visits, links clicked etc.)
• How much they know about your company and its products (where they sit in the buyer journey)
• How much they use your products
• How they make decisions
• Which channels they are using

By doing this, you’ll be able to identify customers who:

• Shop with you most often
• Spend the highest amount of money with you
• Have been reactivated by your marketing efforts
• Shop less often and spend less money
• Are new and recently made their first purchase
• Are new registrants to your marketing activities but are yet to make their first purchase

Different campaigns can then be generated for each type of customer, and a greater emphasis can be placed on targeting your high-value customers.

Do I always need to segment my audience?

If you send your customers irrelevant marketing messages, then you’ll send them straight into the arms of your competitors. That's why customer segmentation is so important. It allows you to put the right message in front of the right customer at the right time and through the right channel.

You should segment your audience before you start a marketing campaign. This is because studies show that people are more likely to appreciate and engage with brands that take the time to personalise their campaigns with dedicated offers that have been created for them.

The more often you go through the campaign segmentation process, the better you will know your customers. Then, the better you know your target customers, the more personalised your campaigns will become. This means you will stand a much higher chance of your campaigns returning a favourable, cost-effective outcome.

Plus, you should also remember that campaign segmentation is an evolutionary process. After all, as people grow up, change jobs, and move house, they will move between segments. Due to this, you need to continually review your segments to ensure they’re up-to-date and monitor how people are moving between segments. If not, you’ll be making marketing decisions based on inaccurate data.

How to use your new segments for personalised marketing

Once you’ve created your segments, it’s time to put your data into action. Using your new segments, you can:

Create buyer personas

A buyer persona contains the common traits that customers within a segment share. They’re generally reserved for your best customers.

By analysing the geographic, demographic, and psychographic traits your best customers share, you’ll be able to flesh out a detailed buyer persona. Within this persona, you should include details about behaviours, likes and dislikes, and preferences for interaction (such as the time of day and chosen platform).

Armed with this knowledge, you can then create content that specifically addresses the challenges these buyers face, or appeals to the lifestyle they’re looking to lead. You’ll also know when and where to target these people.

Plus, once you have a buyer persona for your ideal customer (or a segment that contains customers who are most likely to engage and convert), you can concentrate all of your efforts on these customers, ensuring your time and money are used more effectively.

Position your product

The tone you strike in your copy, the imagery you use to display your product, and the placement of your advertisements say a lot about the intended purchaser of your product.

Concerned you may not be positioning your product correctly and appealing to the right people? The information in your segments can guide you.

By learning more about where your audience is and where you can find them online, you can advertise more effectively. You can then make sure your branding, positioning, and tone are appealing to your best customers.

Create personalised messages

Once you have audience segments and buyer personas, it becomes far simpler to craft campaigns that really resonate with your target audience.

By understanding your audience before you bombard them with campaigns, you can improve your communications and appeal to the wants and desires of your audience. You’ll also ensure that you’re only sending them relevant and targeted information.

Plus, when you know more about their personal history, you can also send them incentives that will boost their loyalty, such as discount codes on their birthday.

How Apteco can help you to segment your campaigns

Our marketing campaign segmentation tools can make the process of segmenting your audience fast, straightforward, and highly accurate. With our tools, you’ll find it easy to maximise the performance of your campaigns by creating and delivering personalised communications. As well as segmenting your audience, our tools allow for geomarketing and cluster analysis, which will help you deliver relevant messages that are tailored to each segment. On top of this, we also offer a diverse range of interactive visualisations. These make it easy to understand the characteristics of your audience. With drag and drop mechanisms, you can also create new audience segments quickly. 

Our powerful tools can also help you with marketing targeting and analysis. This is because we can help you mine a wide range of customer data to pinpoint the ideal audience for the right marketing campaign. As well as helping you understand your customer profiles, we can identify your top customers, perform a sentiment analysis, and improve the relevancy of your campaigns through a geoanalysis. Similarly, our powerful tools will also help you build and refine your campaign audiences. This will speed up your campaigns and allow you to work with confidence.

Finally, our powerful tools will ensure that all of your marketing communications are timely and relevant. Through personalisation, you can recognise individuality and add a personal touch. From helping you promote the best next offer to sending out automated birthday and re-engagement offers, we can help you provide a personal touch that delivers results.

Want to know more about how Apteco’s powerful tools can guide your campaign segmentation efforts and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns? Book a personalised demo with our team today for a time that suits you. Alternatively, test drive the Apteco Orbit™ platform and experience the power for yourself.