target market segmentation tips guidesWith any communication, the person who you’re speaking to will respond better to what you’re saying if what your communicating is relevant to them. The same is true with digital marketing. Thus you need to tailor make your digital marketing messages to the people who are in your target market. This is made possible by segmentation.

What Is Target Market Segmentation?

Target market segmentation is the process of dividing your digital audience according to various demographic factors. The factors that you decide to divide your audience according to will be dependent on those attributes you feel will be more receptive to your products and/or services.

Examples of demographic factors that you can use in your segmentation efforts are:

Gender,
Region that they live,
Buying habits, and/or
Income levels.

How Do You Go About Segmenting Your Target Audience?

To make segmenting your audience for your various digital marketing campaigns easier, you need to gather as much relevant information as possible when people sign up to your e-mail newsletter list or when they buy one of your products and/or services.

Don’t collect a lot of extra information that won’t be beneficial to your digital marketing campaigns. Remember that with data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) you have to have a specific reason as to why you are keeping a person’s personal information. In addition, if you are holding people’s records they are entitled to ask you show them what information of theirs you are keeping and are allowed to ask you to delete this information. So make sure that you have their permission before you add people onto your e-mail list.

The best method of segmentation is simply to set up an Excel spreadsheet of your lists of contacts. Next to each person’s name, list their e-mail address and telephone number as well as various tags that you want to segment your audience according to.

Thus, when you want to segment your audience according to – for example – the region that they live in you can easily sort your audience members according to this parameter and easily get the information that you want to use. This will allow you to send audience members – in specific regions – targeted promotions.

Use Target Market Segmentation for Your Email and Social Media Marketing

As we said previously, your digital marketing campaigns will fall on deaf ears if they are not relevant to the people that you’re sending the messaging to.

Your e-mail lists are like gold. These are the people who’ve let you into their lives and have allowed you to take up space in your e-mail inboxes because they feel that they what you have to say will add value to their lives. This means that segmentation is especially relevant in your e-mail marketing campaigns because if you send a person on your e-mail list a message that isn’t relevant to them you run the risk of them unsubscribing from your list. So to make sure that this doesn’t happen and keep your lists at good levels, make sure that you segment your campaigns well.

Segmentation isn’t just relevant for your e-mail campaigns. It’s also extremely important for your social media marketing campaigns. Platforms such as Facebook allow you to minutely specific what characteristics or demographics of people you want to see your adverts. This means that you need to make sure that you’ve properly segmented your current audience so that you can see how to select an appropriate demographic for your campaigns.

Target market segmentation is an integral part of your digital marketing campaigns as it enables you to ensure that the correct people get the right messaging. This is not a process that you can afford to skimp on or to take shortcuts for because if you get this wrong you run the risk of alienating your potential customers.