For any business, determining their targeted audience can be a challenging undertaking, but there is also no doubt that this is the most important first step to any Internet marketing strategy. Depending on the type of business you are promoting, your targeted audience may consist of a wide variety of demographics spanning all age groups and even multiple nationalities – but how do you reach them? Once you know precisely who your customers are, you should then work on segmenting your targeted audience based on a number of factors, such as demographics, requirements, lifestyle choices and previous purchases. This will allow you to provide personalized content to each segment of your audience.
How Audience Segmentation Works
Audience segmentation relies on the fact that people buying products and services broadly fall into three different groups. They either spend their money to satisfy a requirement, find a solution to a problem or simply because they want something. Some products will fall into only one of these categories, while others may be more versatile. Either way, you will need to determine which category your products or services fall into and market them based on this.
Once you know your audience and have segmented them into multiple groups, you can then provide targeted and personalized content to each one, be it by way of email newsletters, SMS marketing messages or even content on your website itself.
How to Segment Your Audience
Segmenting your audience starts with some effective research techniques. Getting to know who your customers are and what they want from you is the most critical part of any marketing campaign. The following methods can help to analyze your audience and deliver the content that they are most likely to want.
* Social media interaction will allow you to communicate with your customers on a more personal level. Social media allows you to get faster reactions and get involved with community discussions and much more. You will get to know your audience much faster by interacting with them directly over popular social networks, and in doing so, you will be able to group members of your audience accordingly. Another important element of social media is social sharing. This allows you to determine which the most popular content on your website is, as well as identify what type of people like the content the most.
* Web analytics tools, such as the popular Google Analytics program, allow you to find out more about each visitor who comes to your website. Not only will analytics tools be able to provide you with some general information about your visitors; they will also be able to help you identify people’s behavioral trends when they visit your website. You will be able to identify things like the most popular pages, how long people spend on each page, which website people are coming from and where they are headed to afterwards. Analytics are an essential part of any Internet marketing strategy.
* Try asking members of your audience directly what they want by way of things like user surveys and polls. A lot of people don’t have the patience to fill in a survey, but polls take very little time to answer, and they can provide you with some very valuable research information. Some social networks, such as Facebook, even provide polling features built in. Don’t be afraid of asking your audience what type of content they like most and what they’d like to see more of.
Personalizing Your Content
Once you have done the necessary research and determined the broader groups of your audience, based on factors such as demographics and purchase history, it will then be time to start delivering personalized content. Following are some of the strategies you can try:
* Provide automatically personalized content on your website based on the past activity of your visitors. For example, Amazon provides buyer suggestions based on what’s popular, the customer’s previous experience (if any) and various other factors, such as the demographic itself.YouTube provides personalized content in a similar way with its video and channel suggestions.
* Email newsletters provide one of the most tried and tested ways of delivering personalized content. Using different templates and mailing list segmentation tools, you can more easily send out personalized news letters to each member of your audience.
* Different social media services are popular among different sections of the population. For example, Facebook is more for casual users and friendly interactions, while LinkedIn is a social media service designed primarily with professional and business interactions in mind. Provide tailored content through each of the different social channels you use. Don’t simply provide them same content through each one.