Audience segmentation can help you to better understand your different target audiences. This allows brands to provide a more tailored approach in an era where personalisation is key. With access to consumer data becoming more difficult with the likes of the cookie ban and walled gardens, marketers will be ever more reliant on behavioural science to understand consumer behaviour, and audience segmentation could be the solution.
What is audience segmentation?
Audience segmentation is the process of categorising a large, broad audience into smaller groups based on shared needs or behaviours. It is widely used in marketing to better understand the unique motivations behind different customers so that brands can provide a more tailored service. This more personalised approach can increase engagement and customer satisfaction, as well improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, benefiting both consumers and businesses alike.
There are various factors to take into consideration when segmenting audiences. From demographics to psychographics and behaviours, drilling down into who your audience are as individuals allows you to create more effective campaigns reflective of their wants and needs. For example, two people are in the market for a coffee machine, however one person is an aspiring barista looking for the latest tech in the industry, and the other is moving into their first home on a tight budget. Both are looking to buy a coffee machine, however they have very distinct aspirations and drivers which would require different messaging, pricing, product and placement schemes in order for a marketing campaign to resonate and lead them through the funnel. Understanding these differences and placing the right signals in front of different consumers is the key to marketing success.
Why is audience segmentation important?
- Personalisation – Identifying your audience’s preferences and behaviours allows you to provide a more personalised experience. This more targeted approach benefits both the consumer who is getting exactly what they are looking for, and the brand who is building a greater rapport with their audience which can increase brand loyalty and customer retention.
- Effective communication – Understanding who to talk to and how best to connect with them should be the cornerstone of any good marketing strategy. Audience segmentation allows you to not only identify your target audience, but learn what resonates with them, so that your marketing communications can be more effective.
- Reduces ad wastage – Putting ad spend behind a specific audience you know are more likely to convert helps to avoid wasting time and money on generic audiences who won’t engage with your product.
- Drive a greater ROI – A brand’s ability to segment, profile and identify the audience with the highest propensity to buy will drive the greatest return on investment and increase conversions.
- Helps you to stand out from competitors – Understanding who your audience truly are can help you cut through the noise and put your product right in the hands of potential customers.
Introducing Tribes – our audience segmentation solution at Behave
At Behave, we integrated advanced segmentation and profiling capabilities with behavioural science to create Tribes – an industry leading audience segmentation solution. Our Tribes product centres around using Behave’s behavioural science imprint and technology to discover, dissect, and validate audiences that will connect with your brand and subsequently pinpoint to what actually influences them. Therefore, brands can focus their marketing efforts on people who will actually engage with their products and may even convert.
Tribes successfully layers panel data, social data and first-party data (e.g. CRM data) to uncover true audiences and their respective behaviours, which sits at the core of superior targeting and messaging, and then profiles them to evaluate their individual opportunities and barriers for growth, connection and conversion. We’ve seen this not only driving better marketing strategies, but also feed into broader business improvements.
Tribes concludes with a presentation of clear actionable insights, which for clients like Investec, TikTok, The Financial Times and De’Longhi for example, have proven to be massively valuable in setting a brand’s marketing strategy and creating positive shifts for the business as a whole.
Case study: How Tribes helped to drive sales based on audience behaviour
Our client, De’Longhi, faced a challenge of turning consideration activity into a conversion. Therefore, using our Tribes product we helped them to identify the audience segment who would actually convert so that they could turn all of their attention to this group to reduce ad wastage.
Combining first party and social data we tapped into their audience’s interactions, affinities, and behaviour to uncover the distinct segments and real affinities that exist within buyers. Next, we created two separate audience pools (fully-auto machine buyers vs manual machine buyers) to find out what drives the buyers of different machine types and if they behave and convert differently.
Using a range of processes such as data matching and panel statistical clustering we were able to understand the differences in motivations between fully-auto vs manual coffee machine users. This showed a crucial need for the client to create different communications based on machine type which can be shaped on the audience insights gathered for each group. We then recommended mirroring the audience segments’ characteristics to develop target-specific stimuli that would actually lead to a behaviour such as purchasing the coffee machine.
This is just one of the ways our audience segmentation product has been used to solve a business challenge and help brands to shift their strategy to targeting a ‘true’ audience rather than a generic one.
For more information on how Tribes can help your business to better understand your audience to drive greater campaign results contact us today.
