Audience segmentation is the key differentiator between marketers who are wildly successful…
And marketers who just scrape by.
The difference between business owners and marketing managers who can create compelling, enticing marketing that gets their customers excited for their products and services…
And those who consistently see their marketing efforts fall flat.
Audience Segmentation Helps You Create Finely Targeted Marketing
Why does this matter at all?
Because overly targeted marketing beats under-targeted marketing 10 times out of 10…
But creating marketing that’s finely targeted, that’s meant to reach only a small portion of your audience, is very difficult to do if you haven’t first segmented your audience.
[quoteability]Remember, your audience — all those potential customers out there — is a huge mass of people.[/quoteability]
To reach them effectively, you really need to divide the audience into manageable bits.
How you decided to divide that audience is what we mean by audience segmentation — and even the experts struggle with it.
The best way to segment an audience is to create a customer persona (also called a buyer persona — user personas fall into this category as well, but they’re used in a very different way).
A persona is basically a fake character (as in a character from a movie or a book) who represents, as accurately as possible, a segment of your audience — a group of people you want to market your product or service to.
(By the way, we just released a heavily updated version of our most powerful audience segmentation tool — we call it The Ultimate Customer Persona Template, and you can check it out by clicking the button).
Check Out The Ultimate Customer Persona Template
And by segmenting your audience, I don’t just mean dividing them up by demographic information — it goes much deeper than that.
So let’s go deeper.
Audience Segmentation — The More Segments You Can Create, the Better
While I don’t quite want to give away the secret sauce of The Ultimate Customer Persona Template, I can tell you this:
The more segments you create, the better — and the best way to divide your audience is by thinking about them as what they are…
Human beings. Complicated, varied, unique human beings, with as wide a variety of attributes as there are species of beetles.
“God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.” —J.B.S. Haldane
If we treat our audience — that small slice of the population who might be interested in our product or service — like a group of robots, robots who are easily defined by a few characteristics, we risk any message we might craft for them falling flat.
We see gaffes like this constantly — Bic famously made a massive mistake in reducing women to their gender and making pens designed “for her.”
(Want to get started segmenting your audience? Get our Starter Buyer Persona Template free.)
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The reason this doesn’t work, the reason Bic failed, is simple — human beings are not simple.
I am not defined by my interest in writing.
Your neighbor isn’t defined by her sex or her sexual orientation.
Your cousin isn’t defined by his job.
Your aunt isn’t defined by her love of computers.
Your kid’s teacher isn’t defined by his one-time interest in buying a house.
Your pastor isn’t defined by her religion.
There are many, many, many characteristics of complex human beings that need to be considered when trying to craft a message that will reach them, resonate with them, and actually move them to action.
If you treat them as though they’re defined by a single characteristic, you risk insulting or alienating your audience (or worse, setting off a social media s***storm).
You also risk creating marketing that’s just too simplistic to resonate in any meaningful way — something that reduces complexity and turns human beings into stereotypes, turns three-dimensional beings into two-dimensional caricatures.
Which means you risk that expensive marketing of yours failing — and that’s not good for anyone, now is it?
Demographics and AIO Aren’t Bad — They’re Just Not Enough
So the old way of segmenting, when audience segmentation was still in its infancy, was to break an audience down by a few simple characteristics:
- Demographics (age, sex, location, income, relationship status)
- AIO (activities, interests, opinions)
As time went on, we got a little more sophisticated. We added a few things:
- The buyer’s journey
- Behaviors (general behaviors and product/service behaviors)
This can start to get pretty granular pretty quickly, but here’s my point — even all this is not enough.
It’s a good beginning.
But everyone is doing it.
At least, everyone who knows what they’re doing is doing it.
This is base-level stuff. It’s not the 1950s anymore (or the 70s, or even the 90s). Used to be, you could toss an ad in the paper and have people beating down your door to buy “that new-fangled deedly bop ya got for sale there.”
Not anymore. Now every business owner and marketer worth their salt is organized, efficient, understands audience segmentation, and is employing it to create finely targeted marketing.
Which means one thing:
[quoteability]The mere act of targeting a bit won’t set you apart anymore.[/quoteability]
You have to create extremely defined segments of your audience and then hit them with an awesome message that the competition just can’t beat.
It’s a tough marketing world out there, folks — but the answer begins with proper audience segmentation.
There’s a Secret We Use to Segment Audiences for Our Clients
It’s something that goes beyond the methods I’ve listed.
Something you do before you even begin to think about demographics or AIO.
Something that forms the foundation of our Ultimate Customer Persona Template.
Click the button to learn more.
