Audience Segmentation

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Impact on targeting

In general, you can group audiences into four broad-spanning categories. Being aware of these will help you determine how and where to promote your content.

• Baby boomers. Baby boomers were born in the 1940s to 1960s. They’re slow to adopt tech, because they’re an older generation. However, they have a higher spending power. The larger social media platforms are still accessible and can be quite popular with this audience. For example, Facebook.
• Generation X. People who belong to Generation X were born between 1960 and 1980. Generally, they’re settled with families by now. They’re parent marketing targets.
• Millennial. Millennials came of age in the 2000s. They grew up with technology. Smartphones weren’t around when they were born, but they were the first users of smartphones from a generational perspective.
• Generation Z. Individuals in Generation Z were born in the mid-2000s. They’ve never known life without smartphones. Instant content and social media are part of the everyday for this audience.

Tailoring your content

Segmenting your audience even further will make sure that your message content, placement, and context are hyper-relevant to your audience. Key areas to address when segmenting include:

• Age. Don’t just think about people’s date of birth, think about their life stage. Consider if they have children, the level of education that they have attained, and whether they have a full-time or a part-time job.
• Gender. Is it important that your campaign reaches a male or a female audience, or does it have an asexual focus?
• Location/geography. This includes everything from physical location in the world to cultural identification.
• Platform. Where are you placing your content? Are hashtags used there, usually? Does video work best? Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the individual platforms you’re using to reach your audience, and determine if your content is a right fit for them.
• Economic demographic. Consider the purchasing power of your audience. Is your client or prospective consumer looking for luxury or bargain goods?
• Device. Consider what device your audience is viewing on. Are they mostly using desktop computers or smartphones?
• Operating system/browser. Consider the browser your audience is using, how fast it is, and their access to the web.

Key considerations

With all campaigns, you should provide a final recap document or report. The purpose for this is to ascertain what worked and what didn’t. Be sure to take learnings from this document and implement them in future campaigns.

Key areas to address in this document include:

• Consumer feedback. What was the sentiment from users? Was it negative or positive? Did you have great input from users or were they uninterested?
• Analytics/data. How many actions did your content result in? Clicks to site, conversions, sales, and downloads would be key to measure here. Be aware of the cold, hard facts from the individual platforms, and make sure you measure and benchmark against them going forward.
• Objectives. How many of your business objectives did you meet, exceed, or not exceed? It can be hard to single out your social media content as a single contributor to overall business goals, but tying it back to specific goals, such as number of leads generated, will help.
• Relevancy scores. A nice thing to include in a summary document is how the individual platforms rated your relevancy. Facebook, Twitter, and Google all provide you with a relevancy score for your content promotion. Using a ranking of 1 to 10, with one being the highest, they can rank exactly how your content performed with social audiences when it was displayed.