Audience segmentation may seem overly technical for small businesses, but it is an important part of understanding your audience and knowing what is working for your business. By investing the time and effort to generate information about your audience and fine-tune the way you market to different segments, you may save time and money in the future.
Learn More About Your Audience
In order to segment your audience, you will need to learn more about your audience as a whole. This may include designing a survey to capture basic demographics about the people who are engaged with your brand, whether it is following you on social media or those who become customers. Since encouraging your audience to complete a survey can be difficult, one of the easiest ways to make the survey more enticing is to offer a tangible incentive for completion. For example, you may reward survey-takers with an exclusive coupon code for use on your products or give them access to a restricted portion of your website or forum. Another way to capture data is to limit survey invitations to customers. After they have made a purchase, you can follow-up with a survey.
Using both methods may give you more insight into the difference between people who are aware of your brand and those who actually make a purchase. If you find obvious discrepancies between people who are interested in your brand and those who become customers, you might find there are problems with your marketing or the products you choose. Showing you are an all-inclusive brand that is not for a specific age group or highlighting more affordable products could make a difference.
Avoid Wasted Social Media Campaigns
Since social media is an invaluable marketing tool for all businesses, it makes sense to focus on platforms and campaigns that are the most effective. There are several nuances regarding social media and which demographics typically use certain platforms. Knowing this information and how it relates to your specific audience can make your social media efforts more effective. Part of segmenting your audience can be done on the back-end of your marketing campaigns. This includes software that tracks inbound traffic to your website. You may find most of your business comes from specific social media platforms. If so, you can utilize this information in several ways.
First, you may choose to close social media accounts that are not performing well to minimize wasted effort. Additionally, you could choose to change your marketing campaigns on platforms that do not perform as well. In general, developing a good idea for what campaigns will work on different platforms is a matter of experimentation. For example, campaigns using pictures, video, and/or audio, might be more effective on fast-paced platforms such as those with feeds that automatically update.
Refine Your Products
Since your audience may change over the years, knowing more about your audience helps you refine the products you offer. This is a common concern for businesses that promote products that are educational and/or trendy. The people who have followed your brand for years will become more knowledgeable and older, so you will have to include products that reflect their changing needs. For example, if your business is in the beauty industry, the people who have followed your brand over the years are more comfortable applying their makeup and may have new skin concerns.
In addition to promoting educational information and trendy products to newer, younger members of your audience, you will need to include more relevant products and information for people who may need more natural, professional looks and have maturing skin. Not only is audience segmentation important, but you will need to periodically identify changes in your audience to keep your business fruitful.
Just because you have a small business does not mean you cannot implement major marketing strategies and gain a competitive edge. Audience segmentation is an important part of successful marketing.
Share12 June 2017
Hello, my name is Vera Adkins and welcome to my blog about online marketing. I've been interested in this type of marketing for quite some time now because it's very effective. I've had mentors teach me about online marketing because I wanted to learn everything that I could about this subject. Since I now have experience in this field, I wanted to share what I've learned with others. As you read my blog, you'll learn about three very important aspects of online marketing. You'll find out about web marketing, email marketing and social media marketing. After learning about the importance of each one of these methods and how you can apply them, you'll have the information you need for all of your online marketing ventures.