Segmentation
Segmentation is the process of dividing potential customers into groups based on similar interests or characteristics. It helps marketers better under their customers and adapt their messages accordingly.
There are different types of segmentation techniques:
- Behavioral segmentation: based on user behaviors
- Geographic segmentation: based on user location
- Psychographic segmentation: based on user emotions, interests, etc.
- Demographic segmentation: based on user demographic attributes like age, sex, status, income, education, and nationality
- Predictive segmentation: based on the probability of certain conditions or user behavior in the future
6 essential characteristics of a fool-proof segmentation:
- Identifiable: Identifying customers in each segment is very crucial and should also measure their characteristics, like geographic, demographic or user behavior.
- Substantial: Targeting small segments is not a viable practice as it is not cost-effective — a segment, therefore, should be large enough to be profitable.
- Accessible: Your company should engage its segments via different communication channels. For example, when targeting younger segment groups your company should have access to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
- Stable: A segment should be stable enough for a longer period of time to be marketed to strategically. For example, lifestyle is used as a means to segment an audience.
- Differentiable: The users in a segment should have similar traits such as needs that are clearly different from the needs of other users in other segments.
- Actionable: You have to be able to provide products or services to your segments. Spending a lot of time and effort in identifying a particular segment should be able to design any form of action to target them.
Once you have the segments with 9the above traits, you can start breaking down segments by who buys, what they buy, and why they buy (or use or view, etc.) it.
