Is a pet dog an ideal birthday present for everyone? What about a football or a makeup brush?
Products must be targeted to a certain buyer, who comprises a target market.
And this is why powerful segmentation strategies are important for the efficacy of your business.
In this article, we will talk about:
- What is marketing segmentation
- What are examples of segmentation strategies
- What benefits can you get from it
Let’s get started!
What Is Marketing Segmentation?
Market segmentation is becoming an increasingly important element of a solid marketing strategy. This action may determine the difference between success and failure for businesses operating in competitive market landscapes such as eCommerce.
Market segmentation is fundamentally the technique of breaking your target market into accessible segments.
Segmentation can divide a market into subgroups based on:
- Demographics,
- Requirements,
- Priorities,
- Shared interests or
- Other psychographic or behavioral characteristics.
Understanding your market allows for segmentation to be used to target your product, sales, and marketing initiatives.
This strategy may propel your product development cycles by guiding how you generate product offers for distinct groups such as men vs. women or high vs. low income.
What are Examples of Marketing Segmentation?
Funnel Stage Segmentation
The marketing funnel is a visual illustration of the process of converting B2B leads into clients.
Source: ClatterChatter
It is designed to function in a downward direction (thus the funnel), gradually converting leads into consumers.
Picture it like this: Marketers, like a funnel, cast a wide net to gather as many leads as possible, and then gradually nurture potential consumers through the purchase decision, narrowing down these possibilities at each step of the funnel.
People need to know that there isn’t a single version of the funnel that everyone agrees on. Some have a lot of “stages,” while others have a few, and each one has a different name, as well as different actions by both the business and the customer.
If you’re interested in how it works, here’s the sales funnel and email marketing article you might want to check out.
Demographic Segmentation
This answers the question “who”. Demographic segmentation groups people using different variables.
Companies can use demographic segmentation instead of trying to reach everyone in the market. This way, they can spend their time and money on the segments that have customers who are most likely to buy and are therefore the most valuable to them.
Demographic segmentation looks at things that aren’t unique to each person, using variables like:
- Age
- Gender
- Race
- Income
- Educational level
- Religion
- Occupation
Demographics are the most common way to do segmentation. As you can see, this is a simple way to group customers, but it is still very powerful.
Imagine this: you’re tasked with marketing sci-fi or war-based video games. Demographics can help you in filtering out younger individuals ages 18-30. You wouldn’t want to sell sci-fi or war-based video games to grannies, do you?
Another example of marketing segmentation based on demographics is to combine age and income information. Picture this: to target older, wealthy retirees who want to move to Florida and sell their beachfront property, you need to get the “age data” and “income status” of each of your prospects. In this way, you’ll be able to successfully target those who are fitting for what you’re marketing.
Persona Segmentation
Personas are customer profiles to mimic a real customer. They’re based on a person’s demographic information, likes and dislikes, goals and values, pain points, and other factors.
In this case, they can help you figure out how to get to know people on a more personal level, while also giving them the right messages, offers, and products at just the right time.
For example, two 30-year-old men could be living very different lives. One is married with kids, has a high-paying job, and has a new mortgage, while the other is still living at home and doesn’t know what to do with their life. When you think about this example, you can imagine that their shopping habits will be very different.
Demographic segmentation played an important role in affirming their age data, but persona segmentation made that more relevant as we discovered their lifestyle habits.
From this example, we can draw out that the chance of your product being sold is higher for the man who had a high-paying job.
Interest Segmentation
Interest segmentation, or psychographic segmentation, focuses on what customers like to do. This strategy focuses on the most specific markets, where attractiveness, quality, and brand recognition are more important than cost considerations.
Psychographic attributes are the ones that aren’t obvious when you look at your customer, unlike demographic segmentation. Instead, it needs a more in-depth look.
Here, we might look at customers and think about how they are different from each other:
- Personality Traits
- Life Goals
- Hobbies
- Beliefs
- Lifestyles
A psychographic segmentation approach can include marketing high-end musical equipment to music fans who wish to gather the greatest gear or use it as a status symbol in their display collections. These people don’t care about price, but the product and the value that they place on it. This difference is what interests them.
Purchase Activity Segmentation
The purchase activity segmentation approach is when you divide your client base by the number of purchases they made during a given time period.
All of these details can aid you in gaining a better understanding of your consumers’ purchasing patterns and financial situation.
This approach enables you to dig further into additional data, such as average basket size and total revenue by segment, in addition to the number of sales made by your consumers per given time. You’ll be able to boost your web marketing strategies by combining these data.
Consider two groups of consumers. One group made four transactions in a month while the other group made three purchases in three months.
With this data, who do you think has the most frequent purchase activity? From here, you can better understand your customer’s purchasing behavior.
Product Usage Segmentation
Product usage segmentation is a way to classify your users into groups based on how they use your product. If product usage is about how users interact with your product, product usage segmentation is how you group and describe your users based on those interactions.
For example, when you open a food delivery app, the app is likely to record not only what you order, but also what options you looked at, how long it took you to make a decision, and how quickly your food arrived.
Product usage is a way to describe how people interact with a product. This can include a lot of different types of data and user actions.
The best thing about product usage segmentation is that it gives us a better answer to the question “What should we build next?” In this case, if your segmentation helps and influences your product roadmap, then good for you.
Email Activity Segmentation
Using email activity segmentation, you divide your email list into small groups based on things like their traits, demographics, or habits.
You wouldn’t want an invitation to an event in a city you’ve never visited, right? Or a deal on baby things while you’re in your early twenties and not even thinking about having children.
Most likely, this kind of email will be discarded, and you will unsubscribe as well.
Before you start an email marketing campaign, you need to divide your emails into groups. It makes sure that you’re only sending relevant and personalized content to your leads.
Lifetime Value Segmentation
Client Lifetime Value is the expected average income generated by a single customer over the course of their lifetime. In other words, it is the entire income that a business might anticipate from a single consumer. Businesses utilize the CLTV statistic to determine the most profitable consumer categories.
CLV segments enable you to categorize consumers based on this amount in order to deliver them relevant content and activate segment-based flows.
Using CLV is a good idea when you have a long-term relationship with a customer.
For example, when they pay for TV or have a cell phone plan. After the first year, you can see how much money they spend on the subscription drops off. This is good because it lets you know when people are going to stop paying for the service.
Offline Activity Segmentation
Offline activities have a greater influence on your online success than most eCommerce businesses realize.
Offline marketing refers to any advertising done via conventional offline media such as television, billboard advertisements, and radio.
Suppose you have customers who are not so “techy”. How do you approach them?
Here’s an example:
A customized railway ticketing machine was built at Moscow’s Vystavochnaya Metro Station, as part of the 2014 Winter Olympics Sochi advertising effort. At this ticketing machine passengers could save money on their train ticket by doing 30 squats in return for a free railway ticket.
This was an effort to promote a healthy lifestyle as well as the Olympics event to commuters.
Source: Wired
By doing this segmentation strategy, you can determine what message to relay or how you promote your products in a traditional way, especially to those who spend most of their time offline.
Why Is Marketing Segmentation Important?
Companies that split their markets correctly can achieve considerable benefits.
According to a Bain & Company survey, 81% of executives believe that segmentation is critical for increasing revenues. Over a 5-year period, Bain discovered that organizations with outstanding market segmentation strategies earned a 10% greater profit than those with less effective segmentation.
Other benefits of marketing segmentation are:
- More powerful marketing messaging
- Creating efficient marketing tactics
- Getting the right customers
- Finding niche markets
- Lower acquisition costs and higher response rates
Whether you’re conducting an interview or a survey, the next step in your research might be a little hazy.
Keep the more remarkable brand or marketing in mind while gathering large volumes of market segmentation data. Instead of depending just on one or two techniques to describe your consumer groups, integrate the efforts of many tactics.
This provides businessmen with a comprehensive view of their target audience.
Marketing segmentation enables businesses to develop and optimize future goods, as well as market to customers in the future.
