How To Segment Your Target Audience

Giant Puzzle

Segmenting your audience can sound like a complicated task, but all it really means is splitting up your audience into groups. This makes for the highest chance of getting leads. Here are some ways in which your target audience can be segmented.

Type of Customer

This is a simple one. Are you B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Consumer)? Are you looking for a consumer who needs plumbing work or a business that needs printing jobs? You probably don’t need both. Cut out the people who are not going to be using your product or service.

Geography

This is easiest if you are a small business. A lawn care business that only works within a few cities will obviously only need to market within those cities. You can even segment it down to those specific zip codes. If you are state or nationwide, pick the cities where your product sells the best or where you are trying to grow.

Demographics

Here is where things get more complicated. Demographics for consumers can be age, gender, ethnicity, income level, etc. You probably will not want to narrow your audience by every demographic you can think of. Try to imagine the demographics that most affect your audience. For instance, if you sell hearing aids, you will probably want to segment an older audience. If you sell handbags, you may want to segment an audience of women. If those are designer handbags, you may want to segment a higher income audience. For a B2B company, you need to focus on things like the size of the other company, the industry and their total number of sales.

Psychographics

These are the characteristics of your customers’ behavior. What is their buying process? Do they usually buy on impulse? Are they loyal to any other brands? Do they buy based on price or on value? Knowing your clients’ purchasing habits can be very helpful in knowing how to market to them. A good way to find this data is to do a survey of your current customers. If a lot of them searched online to find you, that is where your marketing should be focused. If most of them chose your business because it was affordable, then your low price should be the main point you push across.   

Beliefs and Lifestyle

This segment can be based on religion, political party, nationality and even hobbies. Your target audience could be democrats who volunteer on weekends or Protestants from Latin America. This is another one you could get from a survey.

Buyer Personas

One of the best things you can do is to create Buyer Personas for your ideal audience. Give them a name, a picture and list things about them. For example, let’s say you are the lawn care example. Your target client could be Susie Smith. She lives in a zip code near your location, has a mid to high income level, owns a home and is middle-aged. Make a hobbies list for her and say she likes garden parties and reading. Have fun with it, and it will show you what you really want your audience to be and how you think of them. Make a few different personas. You can use different marketing strategies for more than one segmented audience.

Using the Data

You can segment your audience into as many groups as you see fit. Find the market that means the most to you. Then split up your tactics. If you figured out that young people in California is one of your markets, target a social media campaign there. If you find out one particular town holds a large portion of your market, put up a billboard or two. If you do email marketing, send out different emails to different segments.

The bottom line is that segmenting your audience when marketing can make a huge difference in your results. Get out some data, create some personas and get to work!  

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