Audience Segmentation 101: Your Guide To Gain More Targeted Customers

In the business world, it’s important to gain the right customer base the first time in order to see positive results in your profits and from your marketing efforts. The problem is with such a broad spectrum of customers, it can be hard to work out exactly how to target the right customer so you can see more conversions and sales overall. If you’re in this predicament, here’s an expert guide on audience segmentation and how you can use it to gain more targeted customers for better ROI.

Audience Segmentation Can Improve Your ROI and Customer Base

Audience segmentation can help you improve your profits because it can drive in more customers that are directly related to your business and what you’re offering. Segmenting your audience is the process of narrowing down your audience until you have the most relevant customer. Why does it improve your customer base and ROI?

Because it allows your business to market to the right and relevant audience.
Because you place more money into the right marketing areas instead of the wrong ones, lowering your spending. This in turn gains you more profits.

How To Conduct Audience Segmentation?

So how do you segment your audience? Let’s take a look now:

First you need to establish what categories you will be placing your audience into. These could include:

Psychographics
Behaviours
Geographic locations
Demographics

Once you have worked out your categories, you then need to work on each of your audience’s traits. See below:

Socio Demographic

Religion
Ethnicity/language
Occupation
Income
Sex
Education
Family size
Age
Marital status

Psychographic

Opinions and attitudes
Benefits sought
Values
Preference
Activities
Personality

Behavioural

Readiness to change
Stages of change
Consistency of behaviour
Frequency of behaviour
Relevant behaviour
Duration of behaviour

Geographic

Urban
Rural
Peri-urban
District
Region
Community

Once the main categories are out of the way, you can narrow down your audience a little more.

Potential Audience

Men

Socio-Demographic

20-30 years
Sports enthusiast

Geographic

Major Cities:

Sydney
Perth
Brisbane
Darwin
Melbourne
Adelaide
Hobart

Psychographic

Wants to buy the best sports gear
Wants to meet their favourite sports player
Willing to spend hundreds of dollars on their sport

Behavioural

Plays as many sports as they can, especially loves water skiing
Thrill seeker
Confident
Works hard and is committed

In understanding your audience, you have a better chance of directly targeting the customer your product is suited for. This will also improve your profits and revenue with more sales.

How To Measure Your Segmentation Success?

Once you’ve completed your audience segmentation and have implemented your new marketing plan based upon this new data, you then need to know whether you have successfully gained more improvement in your overall profits, traffic, and conversions. So how do you measure whether the segmentation is a success? After you have run your new marketing campaign for up to 1-2 months, you will then need to look at a few key areas. These include:

Conversion Rate

When analysing your conversion rate, you need to look at a few different areas. These include each stage of the sales funnel, to the amount of organic traffic that have completed a sale. Has your conversion rate increased from the previous months? If it has then you have successfully gained more targeted customers through your audience segmentation. If you haven’t then you may need to look into a few different areas to see whether there’s a problem in the sales funnel. One way to know for sure if there’s a problem in the sales funnel is through the use of heat mapping.

Heat mapping allows you to see the areas that your customers are drawn to. It will allow you to see whether there’s a distraction in the sales funnel that’s causing your customers to abandon the shopping cart or to navigate away from the final sale. This is done through the highlighting of the areas on a web page where your visitors are clicking on the most. This can be seen in the screenshot image below:

Bounce Rate

If your bounce rate is high, it means your website or your web pages aren’t meeting the satisfaction of your targeted audience. To reduce your bounce rate, you should look into finding out what may be causing people to leave. Some areas you may need to address include:

Do you have relevant information, products, or services that your target audience wants?
Do you have high quality, informational and relevant content on your pages?
Does your website look professional, well kept, and attractive to your visitors?
Does your website offer easy navigation points for your visitors to find what they’re looking for fast?

Bounce rates that are generally high are because people don’t like what they find. If you’ve segmented your audience and are receiving high amounts of traffic but still have a high bounce rate, your website needs to be addressed.

Conclusion

By identifying your target audience, you have a higher chance of improving your overall ROI and profits. By understanding how audience segmentation can help you gain more targeted customers you’ll be able to target your marketing efforts more successful with positive results. Are you ready to segment your audience?

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Aaron Gray is a passionate digital marketing expert and the co-founder of Command Center. Command Center is the one place for people to manage and consolidate all their digital assets. The platform was designed for business owners and marketers to take action within the platform to improve sales, measure the ROI on all digital campaigns, and to deliver insights into complex data in simple to understand reports. Aaron’s goal is to help business and website owners take control of their online marketing and assets to be able to make smarter business decisions.