Audience segmentation lets you target your audience well for digital marketing. As per statistics, segmentation helps firms 60% better understand the concerns and challenges of their customers, and 130% better understand their intentions. Again, persona-based segmentation offers around 90% of companies a better understanding of their audience, and around 77% of your marketing ROI will come from better-targeted, triggered, and segmented campaigns. All these global statistics denote that in this digital Bangladesh if you don’t apply audience segmentation for digital marketing, you’ll surely lag behind your competitors. So, let’s learn about audience segmentation in digital marketing for Bangladesh from this blog.
What is Audience Segmentation?
Audience segmentation refers to marketing tactics based on recognizing subgroups within your target audience to offer them more customized messaging and develop more powerful connections.
You’ll divide the subgroups depending on demographics like age, geographic location, income, gender identity, ethnicity, formal education level, and behaviors like preferences, purchasing history, and the like. Again, psychographics helps you dig deeper into the personality types, attitudes, beliefs, and values of your audience. For instance, you can divide your audience into separate segments based on their characteristics such as individualistic vs family-oriented, homebodies vs travelers, leaders vs followers, and the like.
Sometimes, novice marketers develop a generalized message to distribute widely for time-saving. Audience segmentation lets you divide your contacts into specified groups so that you can deliver customized messages to each group.
Types of Audience Segmentation in Digital Marketing
Generally, audience segmentation can be of the following four types in digital marketing:
1. Demographic Segmentation:
Demographic segmentation deals with the who. It is the simplest yet one of the most effective types of segmentation. D2C or Direct-to-Consumers ecommerce brands widely use this segmentation. Just divide your audience and develop customer personas depending on objective data like
- Age
- Income
- Education level
- Gender
- Occupation
- Religion
- Family life cycle
- Family size
- Generation
- Ethnicity
- Nationality
- Economic health
For instance, when you segment the audience based on their income, you’ll be able to attract them with products/services that fit within their budget. This segmentation will mainly benefit new and small ecommerce businesses in the following three ways:
Easily collecting information.
The information is simple to analyze and measure.
The method is cost-effective.
The most popular ecommerce business in Bangladesh, Daraz lifts its conversion manifold on certain occasions. For instance, their women’s day campaign in 2022 was #liveyourdreams and they offered up to 70% discount and up to 6,500 voucher discount. Here, they segmented their audience based on gender.
2. Behavioral Segmentation:
Behavioral segmentation deals with the how. It groups your audience based on their general behaviors shown while purchasing your products. This segmentation lets you divide your audience depending on their:
- Browsing habits
- Purchasing habits
- Spending habits
- Brand interaction
- Loyalty level
- Product feedback
Utilize your website analytics to get the above objective information and you can understand the behavior of your customers from it. You can also predict how they are going to communicate with your brand in the coming days. You can use this hypothesis to offer customized recommendations that fulfill your consumer requirements. For instance, if you buy mainly electronic gadgets from an online selling platform in Bangladesh like Daraz, Pickaboo, and the like, they will show you their special offers regarding electronic gadgets when you’ll enter their app or website.
RFM model is mostly used in behavioral segmentation where R means Recency, F means Frequency, and M means Monetary.
- Recency– How recently your customer has visited your site or made a purchase, and the like.
- Frequency- How frequently your customer visits your site or makes a purchase, and the like.
- Monetary- The amount your customer mostly spends.
Apart from this, you can group your audience depending on their lifecycle phases such as new user, active user, regular user, potential user, VIP user, ex-user, and the like.
3. Psychographic Segmentation:
Psychographic segmentation deals with the why. It lets you group your audience depending on similar beliefs, personal values, psychological characteristics, and political beliefs. For instance, you can segment your customers based on their:
- Personality
- Social status
- Hobbies
- Life goals
- Opinions
- Lifestyle
- Beliefs and values
All these attributes are subjective, so this segmentation is quite difficult, but still, the most significant. You can collect data for this audience segmentation from social media, audience analytic tools, interviews, focus groups, and surveys. You can deeply understand your audience’s needs, likes, pain points, loves, and wants through this segmentation. Then you can develop marketing campaigns that match the psychographic profile.
For instance, the operators like Grameenphone, Banglalink, Airtel, and the like offer customized internet packages, and call rate offers for their several psychographic segments of customers.
4. Geographic Segmentation:
Geographic segmentation deals with the where. This segmentation groups your audience based on their location and where they prefer shopping. Individuals living in the same locality, city, or state generally have similar requirements, cultural preferences, and mindsets. The main benefit of this segmentation is that it gives you information on what the location of your customers informs about some certain geo variables like their:
- Language
- Culture
- Climate
- Density of population (urban vs rural)
Analyze your available information to know how your audience will behave while shopping based on these factors. For instance, people who live in colder areas will prefer buying winter clothes and appliances for home heating.
All kinds of service providers like banks, telecommunications, shopping malls, fashion brands, restaurants, and the like in Bangladesh are following this segmentation along with the other segmentations discussed above.
Steps to Take while Performing Audience Segmentation
1. Gather Audience Information from Analytics:
First, gather your audience’s all information from the analytics or metrics crucial for your digital marketing campaign. This data forms the base of the whole segmentation process. The most common aspects to consider are
- Browsing activities
- Engagement level
- Value, interests, and lifestyle
- Purchase behavior
- Sign up rates of new users
- Platform with the most traffic
- Bounce rate
- Click-through-rate
- Conversion rate
- Unsubscribe rate and more.
For instance, you might find out that 15% of new customers between 18-40 signing up for your ebook have a lower engagement rate. Conversely, old customers between the identical age group possess a 10% greater engagement rate on your ebook.
2. Decide how to Segment the Audience:
In the second step, you’ll decide how to group your audience. Choose any of the four methods discussed above for this purpose. Once you’ve decided how you’ll divide your audience, you can develop various probable segments.
3. Analyze and Select Your Target Segment:
For instance, you like to improve the engagement rate of your ebook but you are targeting active users rather than inactive users. Here, you need to choose the exact segment for targeting. You can use the MASDA to target the exact segment. Let’s see what MASDA is:
M-Measurable | ◈ Can you measure it? ◈ Can you accurately measure the size and purchasing power of your market segment? It will let you know how much effort and resources you should put into this segment. |
A- Accessible | ◈ Can you access your segment? ◈ Can your audience in your segment access your services or products? Target an audience you can reach, connect, and offer services with the exact platform. |
S- Sustainable | ◈ Is the segment big enough to generate an impact? ◈ Does the segment have the probability to convert into your purchasing customers? |
D- Differentiable | ◈ Are all users in the selected segment similar in a related way? ◈ Is your segment comparatively unique to other segments? |
A- Actionable | ◈ Will it offer measurable data? You can’t attain your objectives if your segments don’t offer you any fruitful insights. |
Benefits of Audience Segmentation in Digital Marketing
Audience segmentation has the following benefits in digital marketing:
1. Fewer Negative Feedback:
When you no longer send messages, and emails to individuals who aren’t interested, you won’t annoy them anymore. So, you’ll have fewer chances to get negative feedback.
2. Better Response Rates:
You’ll get better response rates because you are sending messages, emails, and promotional materials to interested people.
3. Lower Marketing Expenditures:
When you are well aware of who your target audience is, you won’t waste your money and time marketing to uninterested people.
4. Lower Long-term Expenses:
Audience segmentation lets you minimize your long-term costs by reducing the time spent on less-qualified leads.
5. Better Targeting:
Targeting your audience becomes easier and faster with audience segmentation. You have better knowledge about your audience by preparing an audience persona and you can develop your email lists, and other marketing strategies
6. Higher Conversion:
Audience segmentation lets your marketing team customize your content as per the segments. So, your customers become satisfied and more engaged with the content resulting in more conversions, and improved return on investment or ROI.
7. Helps Recognize Growth Opportunities:
You can understand your audience’s pain points well with audience segmenting and utilize this data to explore niches where you can expand your marketing efforts. Thus, you can recognize fresh development opportunities.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation for Social Media Advertising
Audience segmentation mainly has the following benefits for social media advertising:
1. Improved Engagement Rates:
Audience or customer segmentation will result in an improved engagement rate by offering customized content that matches certain customer groups. When you segment your audience depending on factors like age, purchase history, or interest, you can develop personalized content that directly addresses the needs and likings of each segment, customers find that content more interesting and relevant. It results in improved engagement rates like shares, comments, and likes. You can also increase your reach on social media platforms with these improved engagement rates.
When customers like, or share your content or comment on them, it will enhance your content visibility to a larger audience. So, you can increase your reach on social media and entice new customers by offering content that matches your target audience.
2. Enhanced Brand Loyalty:
When you segment your audience based on particular factors like age, gender, location, occupation, and the like and address each segment’s needs and pain points by developing customized content strategy, each segment can resonate with your ad content. They feel more satisfied, decide to purchase your service or product, and want to continue it for the long term resulting in brand loyalty. Thus, customer segmentation helps to develop a stronger bond with your customers, and they also continue repeated purchases and refer others to your products or services by word of mouth or on their social media accounts through positive reviews.
You can read also: How to Develop Pillar Content Strategy
3. Increased ROI:
Your social media advertising becomes more targeted when you apply audience segmentation because then you offer tailored ad content for separate segments based on specific factors like age, gender, preferences, and the like. You won’t waste your time and money by trying to target everyone. For instance, you’ll prepare separate ads for young and old age groups. More targeted social media ads will increase your sales, eventually resulting in increased ROI.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation for PPC Campaign
Audience segmentation serves your PPC campaigns with the following benefits:
1. More Powerful Marketing Messages:
When you segment your audiences, you can develop messages that directly address the requirements and wants of your customers. It will help you create ads that resonate with your audiences and result in conversions.
2. Targeted PPC Advertising:
As everything is going digital and marketers are getting more focused on PPC campaigns, it’s becoming quite difficult for you to become noticed. When you use audience segmentation in your PPC ads, you’ll be able to target your audience well resulting in more clicks and an increased chance of conversions.
Recommended reading: How to Take Advantage of Strategic PPC Audience Targeting
3. Preparing Fruitful Marketing Strategies:
Customer segmentation helps you understand your customers well. When you know your customers well, you can develop fruitful marketing strategies to target them. You’ll know well how to communicate with them and which methods, solutions, and strategies will be more fruitful.
Read also: Powerful Digital Marketing Strategies
4. Improved Response Rates and Decreased Acquisition Costs:
Customized marketing messages will generate improved response rates. As you focus your time and resources only on your target audience, the acquisition cost will be lower to generate effective leads and conversions.
5. Attracting the Exact Customers:
Your business’s main goal is to attract an audience who will make purchases and become loyal in the long run. Audience segmentation lets you target your PPC campaigns exactly to the audience who are most interested in your products or services. So, you can attract the exact customers.
6. Enhanced Brand Loyalty:
When your customers feel that your business understands them well, they’ll become satisfied and loyal to your business. Audience segmentation helps you to develop a strong relationship with your customers and turn them into loyal customers.
7. Outperform Your Competitors:
Your competitors are also vying for their audience’s attention. When too many businesses are competing for such attention, it becomes difficult for you to get noticed. Audience segmentation lets you develop tailored ads for specific segments, so your chances of getting noticed are increased and you can outperform your competitors.
Read also: How to do Competitor Analysis for Social Media
8. Recognizing Niche Markets:
Niche markets mean specific, small parts of the population that have particular needs. Audience segmentation helps you recognize these niche markets and prepare services or products to fulfill their specific needs.
9. Staying on Topic:
Audience segmenting in PPC ads helps you stay on topic and stops you from driving away your potential customers. This is because your ad is not too generalized and targeted to your ultimate audience.
10. Improved Profit:
When you segment your audience in your PPC campaigns, you can target your ads to the most attractive audience, and attract them well for conversion by investing more there. Thus, you can improve your profit.
11. Ensuring Growth:
Every business wants to grow. Audience segmentation is an effective way to ensure growth. You can attract new audiences with customized ads and convert them into paying customers and then loyal ones. Thus, you can ensure growth in your business.
12. Product Development:
Audience segmentation lets you recognize the needs and pain points of your audience well. So, you can apply that knowledge to develop products that fulfill those needs and resolve those pain points.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation for Email Marketing
Audience segmentation serves your Email Marketing with the following benefits:
1. Sending More Specific and Relevant Content:
Audience segmentation lets you understand your customers well, so, you can send more specific and relevant content through emails to your audience.
2. Sending the Exact Amount of Emails:
Audience segmentation helps you know the behavior of your users well. You can find out the users who are most active online, by analyzing their replying manners to your emails. Segment these active users separately and try sending them emails frequently to get engaged with them without annoying others who don’t prefer frequent emails. Send others emails occasionally on special events, sending too many emails might instigate them to unsubscribe from your business.
3. Progressing Your Audience’s Position down the Sales Funnel:
If you segment your email list in compliance with the position of your audience in the sales funnel, you have better chances to convert them. Target the subscribers of your emails based on their engagement level.
4. Increasing Your ROI on Email Marketing:
Around 58% of all ROI generated for email marketing comes from targeted and segmented email campaigns. So, segment your email list based on your audience’s engagement level, on-site activities, purchase history, location, and email metrics. Here, email metrics mean segmenting your audience based on their email opening rate, replying rate, non-opening rate, and the like. Try to re-engage the non-openers in attractive ways. If you want to increase your email marketing ROI, segment your email listing accordingly.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation for Content marketing
Audience segmentation mainly has the following benefits for content marketing:
1. More Fruitful Marketing Campaigns:
Audience segmentation helps to customize your efforts and content development based on certain factors. When you can tailor your content according to your customers’ needs and wants, you will be able to develop more fruitful marketing campaigns for sure.
2. Awareness about the Target Audience:
You become more aware of your target audience through audience segmentation. So, you probably won’t do anything that will annoy them and unsubscribe from your services. Rather you’ll always do such things that will encourage them more to purchase your product or use your services.
3. An Awesome Customer Experience:
Audience segmentation lets you offer your audience an awesome experience through unique and helpful content. Because you know well what your customers want and what will work for them.
4. More Concentrated Strategies:
Your content strategies will become more concentrated with audience segmentation because you’ll make your content SEO-optimized means covering all the keywords that will match your target audience’s characteristics, needs, and wants. Above all, you will develop helpful and unique content for your audience that will meet their requirements.
5. Improved Brand Recognition and Loyalty:
When you’ll use audience segmentation in content marketing, you will address the needs and pain points of your audience well through your helpful content and will offer solutions accordingly. So, your satisfied audiences will recognize your brand and become loyal customers in the long run.
Benefits of Audience Segmentation for CRO
Audience segmentation serves your CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization with the following benefits:
1. Customized Marketing:
When you divide your audience into smaller segments, you can better realize their requirements and wants. So, you can develop more customized marketing strategies based on this knowledge. It will help you get more effective leads and better conversion.
2. Enhanced Efficiency:
Audience segmentation lets you focus your marketing efforts on those segments that are more likely to convert. So, you will allocate your resources and time more efficiently than before and get more conversions.
3. Improved Understanding of Customer Requirements:
From the beginning of this blog, I’ve been discussing that audience segmentation lets you know your audience well and also their requirements. When you know your audience and their requirements well, you can attract them well, and convert them as well.
4. Better Customer Experience:
Audience segmentation gives you a better understanding of your audience, and their requirements, so, you can put all the effort to give them a better customer experience. When you can offer them a better customer experience, they will be converted and become loyal too in the long run.
Final Words:
Now, you must have become crystal clear about audience segmentation in digital marketing for Bangladesh. If you have more queries, please check the FAQ section, and need any assistance with digital marketing, please contact digiSocial.