TELEPHONE 01206 625222What are the benefits of segmenting customers?
Segmentation drills down into a particular audience's needs and buying characteristics, for example, marketing channels and sales channels. There are many reasons why your business would benefit from segmenting its customers or audiences, but here are our top three:
Our audience segmentation service can help businesses define their target customers, identify the segments those customers belong to, and contribute towards an increase in organisational focus. 94% of businesses believe that personalisation 'is critical to current and future success'. Amazon is a great example of a company that has fully embraced personalisation. No two people are likely to see the same version of the home page when they login: the products shown tailored to previous purchases or searches. Smaller organisations can use simple personalisation techniques in their marketing without making a huge initial investment. Segmenting your email data list by preference is a great place to start and will enable you to tailor your communications to your different customer groups.
Customer segmentation is equally applicable to business to business and business to customer models. While most businesses have enough experience and industry-specific expertise to anticipate which segments they are targeting, further analysis can often bring up surprises or segments that have been under-served. Without understanding the key customer groups that a business is serving, it often results in a lack of market focus that impacts both human resources and revenue. People are, and have always been, at the heart of marketing. After all, it is the business function responsible for identifying and satisfying the needs of customers in a profitable way.
In order to profile your customers, we help you to consider all the information you have from various sources. These could include accounts, transactions, customer feedback, marketing newsletter sign up, web analytics and social media analytics. This information fits into several categories that allows the division of your audience into homogenous groups.
At Mackman Research, we understand that people are different. That's why our in-depth workshops are designed to get to the heart of your audience as individuals. What do your customers do? What are their behaviours and interests? What demographic bracket do your customers come from? What are their needs, behaviours and motivations? In short, working with senior leadership personnel to understand what makes your audience tick. For example, a B2C chocolate brand that sells ethically sourced and vegan treats may have several key segments, chief among them being environmentally conscious customers, those on a plant-based diet, and premium chocolate fans. To drill down deeper, these groups could be separated on the basis of socio-economics, location, age, gender and buying behaviours.
Our audience segmentation service can be particularly useful as part of a larger marketing project, such as website design. The more specific you can be about your target audiences and markets, the more effective a website will be when it comes to:
The benefits of more targeted and relevant website content are increased conversions and return on investment due to the improved quality of traffic that's coming to your website.
The segmentation process is fundamentally the same, no matter the size of an organisation - we help businesses of all sizes to understand their key audiences. However, for larger enterprises, there may have been segmentation exercises undertaken in the past that require updating or confirming, whereas smaller organisations may not have been through the segmentation process before. We talk you through key steps and make all resources available following our workshops in the form of individual personas broken down into core elements:
By segmenting your audience, you can meet the growing expectation from consumers that where something can be personalised, it will be. Whether it's the homepage of a website a consumer regularly uses, or through the use of notifications or emails, it is now expected that marketers will get the message and the offer right. Companies that are sitting on a wealth of customer data and haven't yet started using it to their advantage are in danger of being left completely behind.
We host our segmentation workshops at our offices in Sudbury, Suffolk. The sessions are designed to prompt key leadership personnel to reflect on their key audiences and what differentiates individuals' needs and expectations. We do this using visual maps that can be revisited at different points during the session, as once the discussion starts flowing, more ideas come up and can be added to previous personas.
The researcher running the session will explain the function of the personas and elements that constitute a persona - for example, once a customer has realised their need for your product or service, it's essential to understand the contributing factors behind this catalyst moment. This insight is part of the story here, as the wider context surrounding the customer's realisation is what can shape your tactical marketing.
Through our audience segmentation service, we believe in also understanding:
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