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Creating a Successful Market Segmentation Plan through 5 Simple Steps
Given the highly personalised nature of online content and UX implementation in the marketing industry, it’s no longer enough to simply deliver goods to customers and call it a day. Whether you already have a content marketing strategy in place or are looking for ways to up your game in terms of customer targeting, successful market segmentation can help you achieve those goals. According to MailChimp, segmented marketing strategies have shown 14% higher email open rates than their non-segmented counterparts, with a 100% increase in clicks and engagement across the board due to relevant targeting.
Approaching your customers with content relevant to their needs is a surefire way of encouraging them into recurrent purchases of your products and services. With that said, let’s take a look at how you can create a successful market segmentation plan for your business through several simple steps.
Advantages and Importance of Market Segmentation
Before we go further, it’s worth noting why market segmentation is relevant to business growth and how you can benefit from its implementation. In short, market segmentation represents the literal division of your leads into several categories based on their preferences and expectations from your brand.
This process is especially important if you work with an international customer base with a plethora of cultural, social and lifestyle differences between each other. Successful market segmentation will allow you to create more personalised content marketing and ensure that your bounce rates drop while your conversion rates grow. Besides that, there are several important benefits to market segmentation for your business, including the following:
- Clearer targeting of customer’s needs
- Competitive market positioning
- Easier long-term business goal setting
- Higher market retention
- Post-campaign analytics opportunities
- Increased portfolio profitability
Market Segmentation Plan Writing Guidelines
1 – Set your Business’ Objectives
When it comes to creating a market segmentation plan for your business, you should start the process with in-house auditing and reflection. What are your business’ main products, revenue targets and long-term goals? What can you offer to the customers and how do those products or services help your business reach its corporate goals? Make sure that your business goals are clear to the marketing and content departments in order for them to approach segmentation in a more deliberate manner.
Michelle Grain, Head of Content Department at Is Accurate spoke on the matter recently: “Any form of customer segmentation or market analytics will be in vain without clear business objectives set in stone. Once these goals are in place and your employees and board members are clear on the direction you’re taking, segmentation will become a natural next step in the business’ evolution.”
2 – Identify your Customers
Next up, you should pool your existing customer data, email listings and social media follows into data that will be used for market segmentation. This will help your business in a number of ways, including the possibility of personalised search recommendations and more accurate content marketing targeting.
You can split your existing customers into several categories based on demographic filters such as age, gender, country of origin, type of product purchased, the amount spent, etc. Once you identify a large group of people with the same preferences, you can name that segment of your customer base accordingly for later reference. Likewise, any new customers which you attract with future targeted content marketing can be added to pre-created segments for streamlined segmentation.
3 – Evaluate their Wants and Needs
Once you have segmented your pre-existing customer base into manageable segments, you should match them with your products and services to the best of your knowledge. For example, someone who may have bought a toaster might also be interested in other models, related products and other kitchen appliances.
This practice is known as personalised product recommendation and it will help you reaffirm your segmentation decisions. If users repeat their purchases based on your recommendations, the segmentation was successful and new customers should be added into defined categories down the line. If the opposite is true, you should reevaluate your segmentation filters and customer profiles for any anomalies or errors before moving forward.
4 – Develop Relevant Content
When it comes to attracting new leads and converting them into loyal customers, relevant content is necessary for the process to take place. You can use the segmentation categories you’ve previously established in order to create marketing materials for future brand positioning.
The content can then be published via a plethora of communication channels including social media pages, personalised emails, messaging app content, your blog and others depending on the customer’s preferences. Not only is it important to create content relevant to different customer profiles but also to publish it in the right place and at the right time. Make sure to test the proverbial waters before committing to a marketing strategy and your segmentation efforts will pay off in spades.
5 – Follow Up and Evaluate
Once your newly formed market segmentation and content marketing strategy are in place, you should follow up on them with real-time conversion analytics. This will ensure that you are on the right track when it comes to customer targeting and content personalization in real-time, allowing for changes to be made on the fly. Underperforming content can be retrofitted to fit the customers’ expectations more closely while high-performing pieces can be positioned into more prominent communication channels.
Real-time performance analytics are important for post-campaign evaluations as well as revenue growth with each successive marketing push. Make sure to evaluate your data afterwards and implement any new tidbits of customer segmentation information you’ve learned from the previous engagement and conversion attempts to maximize your business’ performance on the market.
In Conclusion
Market segmentation is a pivotal step in the customer engagement process for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it will allow you to really get to know your stakeholders as individuals with likes and dislikes, allowing you to cater to their needs more easily.
Whether you are an eCommerce business, a cloud-based service provider or a retail company, market segmentation can help you achieve your goals more quickly and clearly. Give it a try and retrofit it to your portfolio and customer base for the benefit of both parties.
Bio: Bridgette Hernandez holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology and is a professional dissertation writer. She plans to publish her own book in the near future and is currently developing her research writer skills by contributing to platforms such as Best Essay Education and WoWGrade. In her spare time, Bridgette enjoys long walks and the process of cooking international dishes.