Audience Segmentation. What SaaS Companies Need to Know
Identifying smaller groups within an audience in order to generate more targeted marketing and messaging. Ideally, audience segmentation allows you to build stronger connections with contacts.
An in-depth understanding of your audience and audience segmentation is key to effective marketing. Without knowing the person that is receiving your marketing messages, they cannot resonate. All marketing needs to be targeted, and this is why marketers spend time honing their buyer’s personas.
Assuming that you’ve identified your buyers and your marketing has targeted them well, it’s important to gather further information where possible. Detailed data will help you better understand your target audience, their pain points, and why your tech is the ideal solution.
Not only that, but your marketing should continue to be targeted depending on their current situation and the problems that they face. The market continues to shift and evolve, and your marketing needs to stay relevant.
Audience segmentation is a key tool offered by popular CRMs, including HubSpot and Salesforce. These systems allow you to break your audience down into smaller groups, so that you can target niches more effectively.
What is Audience Segmentation?
Fundamentally, audience segmentation is the breaking down of groups of your audience into smaller subgroups. Ideally, these groups will be more specific, and allow you to shift your marketing accordingly.
It is a popular marketing strategy. Audience segmentation allows you to focus on specific characteristics of your contacts, and serve them with quality content or marketing efforts that suit them.
Initial marketing approaches find a niche audience, but then target them on a wider scale with their marketing messages. While this makes sense to start with, as each lead or contact becomes engaged with your business, they will need varying approaches to nurture each individual relationship.
The best marketing is about building relationships. Identifying the differences within your audience, and how you serve each individual, is the key to increasing your conversions and sales.
The Importance of Audience Segmentation
As mentioned, marketing is about establishing a connection. Like any relationship, the key is to find a common ground, an understanding, and effective communication. Audience segmentation allows marketers and salespeople to establish more lasting relationships with prospects.
In today’s digital world, the average consumer or buyer has become much savvier. We understand when we are being sold or marketed to, and have the autonomy to make our own decisions. As a result, non-targeted or loosely-targeted marketing messages just don’t work.
As buyers, we want solutions to our problems. However, more than that, we want to trust the brands that we choose to provide a service or solution that really works.
Audience segmentation is critical to converting contacts and leads into sales, as it allows you to target the person, not the demographic or group. Understand why each person is engaging with your business, and nurture that association in order to generate lasting working relationships.
Types of Audience Segmentation
There is no set way that you should segment your audience. This will be entirely dependent on the information that you need to nurture your audience, and generate your marketing messages. In fact, it’s worth trialing multiple subgroups to find what kind of segmentation is most effective for your brand.
Demographics
One of the most obvious ways to segment an audience is by its demographics. These groups might be based on gender, location, age, industry, or others. Segmenting by demographics might be a good way to start an audience segmentation strategy. However, this will be entirely dependent on your company and your solution.
For instance, a popular brand in beauty would likely find that segmenting an audience by gender has a limited effect when the majority of the audience is female. However, in B2B marketing, segmenting by industry might be a great way to target messages that identify specific pain points within that industry.
Buyers Journey
Not every person within your contacts list is going to be ready to make a purchase. In fact, the majority of those within your audience list are likely to be at the beginning stages of the buyer’s journey.
The information that will be valuable to your leads will vary depending on the extent to which they are aware of their problem. For instance, a buyer that hasn’t even identified the problem will need entirely different content than one that is specifically interested in your company.
Audience Behaviors
This strategy takes a step deeper than segmenting by demographic. Segmentation by psychographics and behavior allows you to target the person beneath the data. You can identify and group by how often they make purchases, how they make them, and the reasonings behind their decisions.
For instance, someone that makes a purchase once every two years requires different messaging than one that purchases something multiple times a month. Depending on your goals for your audience, you can nurture those segments with different content or offers. Similarly, a first-time buyer will need different information than a repeated buyer.
Engagement
How engaged are your contacts with your marketing? Do they open every email? Or, do they frequently respond on social media? Perhaps some segments of your audience don’t engage at all.
Whatever level of engagement, each of these groups will need different marketing approaches. Someone that regularly reads your email newsletters already trusts your content. Whereas, someone that rarely opens them might need something more intriguing to generate higher open rates.
Consider splitting your contacts into those that are actively engaged, those who have engaged once, and those in between.
Devices and Media
Buyers interact with brands in a variety of different ways in the current digital landscape. Some buyers prefer to use social media to make decisions, some prefer email communication, and some might prefer video. With so many ways to consume media, it’s natural that your contacts will vary.
As an example, a younger decision maker within a company might spend more time on a smartphone or tablet, and consume content via social media or video apps like TikTok. Whereas, those that are older might prefer email newsletters, and use their desktops or laptops to consume content.
Each of these variables will dictate how your content should be delivered, and its appearance or content.
An Effective Segmentation Strategy
The right way to segment an audience will be different for every company, and every marketing team. Monitor your marketing performance, and ensure that your segmentation strategy is helping your marketing to achieve better results. Try to avoid segments that are too small, and overwhelming your marketing team with little variations.
Overall, audience segmentation is an effective marketing strategy that allows you to build marketing relationships with buyers based on value and trust.
At Nituno, we work with B2B Tech companies to build marketing strategies for maximum performance. Whatever stage you’re at, we can help you to improve your lead generation, integrate new technologies, and keep track of your leads from marketing to sales. Get in touch with us today to discuss audience segmentation for your brand, or your overall marketing strategy.
