Segment target audience
Segment target audience
1. Gather all the information you can find on customers.
To find information: Speak to customer facing staff. Look at existing research. Analyse social media accounts. Review analytics and search data. Run surveys. Speak to customers. As you look at the information you find, identify: Demographic information. Buying habits. Common pain points or goals. Location. Job roles. Influencing factors. Channels they favour.
2. Create a spreadsheet and catalog all the characteristics you have on your audience including any ranges or differences between groups.
Some examples might include: Location: Rural / Suburban / Urban. Buying Habits: Single Purchase / Multiple Purchase / Regular Purchase. Preferred channels: Instore / Online / Phone.
3. Create a shortlist of segments based on availability and distinctness of messaging.
For now, remove segments that: Are hard to reach because of their behavior like children or the elderly. Are expensive to reach. Do not require distinct messaging. In other words, you won’t approach marketing to each segment that differently.
4. Create another tab in your spreadsheet. In Column A, list the largest remaining segments.
Leave enough room below each new group in Column A to accommodate for the segments with the largest number of differences. For instance, if there are five different lifestyles for your psychographic data, leave at least five empty cells below your group to make space for the next step. An example of one of these new segments could be married, middle-aged (45-60) women.
5. List any of the remaining segmentable demographic and psychographic categories, starting in Column B and working horizontally.
For instance, remaining categories could be values, interests, or success factors.
6. List any segmentable differences under each appropriate category, for each group you’ve listed in Column A.
7. Highlight the qualities for each group and category that most closely resemble your buyer personas.
These represent your new, segmented target audiences.