The primary objective of any marketing automation strategy is to engage and nurture leads. Automation platforms such as drip campaigns, behavioral-trigger notifications, and mail merge allow you to focus on each specific customer to personalize their experience.
In this era where marketing is all about creating the best quality product, you will need to create genuinely unique content if you want to attract leads. Demographics help separate different people based on their core attributes such as age, location, gender, and more. But with the changing consumer behavior, demographic segmentation is no longer enough to generalize and separate customers. For that, you will need to work on explicit segmentation beyond general demographics so that you can understand what your customers want.
Besides separating and grouping a business’s marketing audience into subgroups, based on different characteristics they possess and the attributes they share, you can also segment customers by their preferences. Remember, proper personalization of outreach and marketing content is critical to future success.
How Do You Engage Modern-day Customers?
There are different types of segmentation that you can implement in your marketing system to drive measurable engagement:
Type 1: Psychographic Segmentation
To offer your customers the best-personalized experience, you need to know what, why, and how your customers think and segment them accordingly. Psychographic data enables you to analyze the motivators that drive your audiences’ buying behaviors. Unlike demographic data which only tells you which person of what age and location is buying something, psychographic data also tells you why those people are buying it. It gives a detailed idea of customer values, lifestyles, class status, opinions, beliefs, and everyday activities.
If you know how to use psychographic data correctly, you can improve your marketing campaign outreach to a great extent. It enables you to connect with your customers at an emotional level and shows how a product works for them. It tells marketers where a product fits into their customers’ lives so that marketers can create messages accordingly. By analyzing an audience’s different buying behaviors, psychographic data uses qualitative research such as surveys, interviews, and quizzes to uncover each participant’s behavioral patterns.
Type 2: Customer Value Segmentation
Just because a prospect is reading your content does not mean that they will buy your product. It would be best if you continue reinforcing why your products are helpful to your prospects. This is known as interest-based segmentation. It is the process where marketers can scale their outreach and push prospects further down the sales funnel by offering them a sales-led demo of their product. Interest-based segmentation focuses on creating content that provides expert tips and value to your prospects, leads, and existing customers as they search for their ideal products and solutions.
Type 3: Business Value Segmentation
Good marketing practices were all about putting customers first until the COVID-19 pandemic. Now you need to develop a segmentation strategy that places leads, prospects, and customers in groups based on how much value they can give to a business. This type of value-based segmentation is not a personalization-driving segmentation technique but keeps businesses moving forward during a crisis.
Segmenting customers based on how they have been affected helps you offer personalized and empathetic content. Businesses need to have a conversational customer experience to reach out to the customers, show concern and a sincere desire to help them, and offer empathy and fellowship to keep their businesses, during a crisis.
Type 4: Engagement Segmentation
This is one of the most effective methods of segmenting your audience in which you group them based on how they engage with your brand. By considering how prospects, leads, and existing customers engage with a brand across different spectrums of platforms, you can decide how to nurture them further. Analyze customer engagement with different marketing metrics such as social media, email open rates, click-through rates, and devices customers use to consume your content.
If you notice a prospect is not opening your emails for a long time, then there is no point in sending them more follow-up emails. But if you notice that a prospect regularly opens your emails but doesn’t respond, you can try to put them in a specific engagement group and tailor an outreach strategy to their pattern of engagement.
Thus, audience segmentation goes way beyond the demographics segmentation method to understand buyers’ motivations and requirements to understand what your customers want. Moreover, personalization beyond demographics needs A/B testing of your messages and content to find the correct tone and copy that increases open rates, engagement, and conversion chances.
If you are unsure of how to segment your leads and customers, or how to implement these different lead segmentation methods, Marrina Decisions can help. Our marketing automation experts can guide you with the right segmentation strategies for your business while streamlining your automation. Reach us via our “Contact Us” or say “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com. You can also message us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
