Now What Does Customer Segmentation Really Entail?
Customer segmentation is a strategic marketing tactic that enables marketers to market to customers based on their unique characteristics. With it, marketers can categorize their audience by way of their unique psychographic and demographic characteristics. Doing so enables marketers to uniquely package and direct their marketing messages and campaigns to directly target specific customer groupings. This way, the right message gets to the right audience thereby increasing the effectiveness of your marketing messages. This ultimately helps marketers to optimize their messages to each group for better effectiveness. By so doing, individual customers would receive only messages relevant to them. This helps to maximize the power of the marketing messages and ultimately their effectiveness.
You’ll get to understand this well when you consider the commonest parameters for customer segmentation which include:
• Demographic Categorization: This takes location into account in categorizing. So factors like where you reside comes into play. Whether you reside in rural, suburban, or urban area takes center stage here.
• Personal Attributes: These are factors unique to the individual customer. You can thus target your customers based on gender, age, educational status, marital status, state of life, languages they speak and so on.
• Shopping Records: This involves evaluating the shopping records of the customer, customer behavior, responses to product promotions, frequency of shopping, and the volume/value of purchased products and so on.
If you understand these parameters well enough, it will be easier for you to segment your customers, market specific messages to each group and get better results from your marketing campaigns.
Next is to consider the strategies that help make customer segmentation really effective in marketing. Therefore, if you are able to categorize your target audience based on the following parameters, it can help to make your marketing campaigns more effective.
1: Behavioral Segmentation: This customer segmentation strategy is largely based on customer behavior. It takes into account the customer’s lifestyle, personal preferences and habits. Marketers can diligently study the purchasing habits of their customers by harvesting data from different online media platforms. This data can give marketers accurate insights into how different age brackets for instance shop, what they shop for and their social media hangouts. When marketers know the buying behaviors or shopping patterns of their customers, they can then recommend special products to meet their needs.
2. Demographic Segmentation: This involves categorizing your audience based on their geographical locations. It is premised on the reasoning that people from a common location are likely to share some basic traits. So, when marketers have accurate data on the location, religious beliefs, educational status, marital status, age, gender and demographics, they can personalize their marketing campaigns better for customer targeting.
3: Customer Journey Segmentation: Customer journey segmentation focuses largely on the different stages of the buying pattern of a customer. The reasoning is that each stage of the customer journey requires specific marketing messages suitable for the stage. This is because at every stage, the customer/potential customer engages with different elements on your website. Elements like content, CTAs, product images, descriptions, etc. come into play. Customer journey segmentation helps marketers to identify the pain points and behavioral patterns of customers in their buying process. This information helps marketers to device ways to streamline and smoothen up this journey for the benefit of their customers.
4. Psychographic Segmentation: Psychographic customer segmentation largely focuses on the personalities of customers. It involves using psychographic information about your customers to categorize them based on their attitudes, behaviors, and opinions. As a marketer, if you diligently observe your customer interests and opinions, you can clearly identify their way of life and what they like to do and how they choose to do it. Accordingly, you can carefully design your marketing campaigns specifically for such way of life.
Last Line
Marketers choose customer segmentation to enhance their marketing campaigns for better results. Optimizing your marketing messages and directing them to identified groups that need the messages most helps the effectiveness of such marketing messages. This is the reasoning behind customer segmentation.
