Digital marketing is a vital part of running a business in today’s digital era. Even before the pandemic, there was a push for businesses to emphasize their online options and make things more accessible to all consumers. As more companies moved to a digital landscape, the market became more saturated, and the competition became increasingly fierce.
The current global pandemic is pushing consumers to social distance by staying home and shopping online or using curbside pickup instead of going into stores. It’s even more challenging to reach your target audience through digital marketing as every store scrambles to build an online presence.
One way to keep your business’s online visibility high with your target audience is to understand and employ audience segmentation in your digital marketing campaigns. Explore this guide to different audience segmentation types and discover what each type can do for your digital marketing strategy’s success.
The Different Types of Audience Segmentation
There are many different types of audience segmentation you can employ to aid your digital marketing campaign. Each comes with a unique set of benefits for different businesses.
Affinity Audiences
Affinity audiences reach people based on a well-rounded view of their lives and selves. Lifestyles, passions, habits, and more are taken into consideration when looking for affinity audience segments.
Affinity audiences are audiences of people who show a definite interest or passion for a specific topic. This allows advertisers to reach people who are already passionate about their offerings, business, or fields related to their products or services.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences allow a company to target exactly who they want through keywords, URLs, and apps. For example, instead of reaching an affinity audience for people who love crafting, a company that sells yarn may want to reach consumers who run small knitting or crocheting businesses instead. By using custom audiences, this yarn company can define its audience with keywords such as “handmade clothing business owner” or “crochet or knitting enthusiast.”
In-Market Segments
In-market segments of an audience are people who are already in the market for your products or services. This means they’re already researching products and actively considering buying a service or product similar to one your company offers.
This is a conversion-driven approach that allows advertisers to focus on increasing conversions by targeting those with a high likelihood of purchase. Once you decide who the target audience is for your business, you can target them specifically.
Similar Audiences
Similar audience segmentation automatically finds new customers who are similar to a company’s existing customers. Google Ads uses machine learning to update similar audience lists in real-time, allowing you to compare new uses to current remarketing lists.
This process presents an opportunity to create impressions on people that share similar characteristics to your existing customers, as well as people on your remarketing and customer match lists.
Customer Match
Customer match audiences provide a business with the opportunity to use their online and offline data to reach and re-engage with existing or previous customers. This requires businesses to use the information provided by customers to ensure they see targeted ads.
Life Events
Life events audience segmentation surrounds those currently or about to experience a significant life event or change. This could mean individuals who are about to graduate from high school or college, engaged people, people buying a new home, or people expecting a child.
Major life events are infrequent, so there is a smaller audience reach, but it is highly targeted. For example, if a person gets engaged, they will be actively looking to purchase things related to weddings. This makes it a perfect time to show them advertisements for flower shops, dresses, nice suits, venues, and more. Their demand for wedding-related items and services will last anywhere from a few months to a few years, depending on when they schedule their wedding.
Detailed Demographics
Detailed demographic segmented audiences allow companies to reach large portions of a population that share a common, specific trait. An example of a detailed demographic is new parents. New parents are a highly specific audience looking for similar products and services, such as baby clothes, solutions for diapers, reliable childcare services, and more.
Remarketing
Remarketing is an extremely effective method of interesting people who engaged previously with a company’s products or services. This method works well in conjunction with other methods, including paid search and paid social media advertising.
Remarketing retargets past website visitors, mobile app users, people who clicked on an advertisement on any platform, and even those who watched a video. Businesses can also remarket to those who previously provided them with contact information.
Key Takeaways From Audience Segmentation
Simply understanding what types of audience segmentation are available isn’t enough to catapult a digital marketing strategy to success. Employing the right style for your business is essential. Investigate a little deeper with these key takeaways from audience segmentation.
It’s Complex
Audience segmentation on Google is a complicated thing. It’s just like the groupings in which Google categorizes certain people based on their interests, search behaviors, and habits. This is all completed by a complex algorithm. As a business owner, you have your own business to run. Taking the time to delve deep into using an algorithm that will provide the best results for digital marketing techniques may be more time consuming than it’s worth. Hiring a professional search marketing agency is a lucrative alternative. With a professional agency, you’ll have experts working all the time on your digital marketing techniques and creating successes. Meanwhile, you can focus on running your business.
You Need To Know Your Audience
Your current clients and customers are vital to understanding your target audience. Discover more about your existing customer base so you can better target them, as well as consumers like them and other untapped markets going forward.
You can achieve this through many avenues, such as:
- Survey customers when they visit your site, make a purchase, or even cancel subscriptions.
- Communicate with clients and ask for feedback.
- Check customer profiles and compile similar datasets.
- Understand audience intent.
- Track what type of messaging your customers respond best to.
Understand How To Use Your Audience’s Information
Once you have a clear picture of your current audience, it’s crucial to understand what you must do with that information. Using audiences to collect data allows you to change your messaging to suit those demographics and establish better conversion rates.
You can also target consumers based on what you learn from previous audience segmentation types. Often, talking to an expert in digital marketing and audience segmentation is beneficial to marketing strategies and success rates.
Logical Position is a creative digital and search marketing agency that specializes in multiple areas of digital marketing. We are a Google Partner, giving us an edge on the competition and expertise in running paid search campaigns. When your business partners with Logical Position, you gain a dedicated team of experts who will work to increase your company’s profitability and return on ad spend. Contact us today for a free consultation and to learn more about what we can do to help your business reach its full online potential.
