There are many ways in which to segment your audience and buyers in order to try to personalize your marketing to them. The key is to choose the data which will be most helpful to you in making sales. You can segment by industry, demographics, buyer persona, stages in the buying process, and more.

Why do you want to segment your audience? Shouldn’t you just send them all the same message? The goal of segmenting is to give them the information that they want from you based on the stage of their buyers’ journey. And if you sell in multiple categories, it’s really important to talk to your audience about the products they are interested in. If you don’t they will ignore you and think you don’t understand them. Which might be true.
Let’s look at a few of the most common methods of segmentation.
Niche or Industry
Focusing on a specific niche or industry is the recipe for success when it comes to online marketing. Instead of the “scattershot” approach of a TV ad, for example, you can focus specifically on people interested in pets, golf, health, and so on. Coca-Cola ads run all the time, but if a person is not a soda drinker, avoids caffeine, or prefers Pepsi, all the ads in the world are never going to make them buy. Those generic ads are designed to make people more “brand aware” and they do not necessarily convert people into buyers. If you don’t have a huge budget to spend (most of us don’t), then you should focus on your niche and target the people who are likely to purchase your product.
Demographics To Segment Your Audience
Demographic sets are the most common way to segment your audience. They are based on customer traits and can be used to formulate the outline for a buyer persona for the typical customer in your niche or industry. When you do this, you can easily create an ideal customer story that will help you really connect with your customers.
The most common demographic sets are:
* Age
* Gender
* Marital Status
* Occupation
* Income
Geography
The location of your customers can have a huge impact. If you are a local café, for example, there is no point in marketing to people who live overseas. Targeting by zipcode/s near your establishment can help. You are able to do this through ads and specific content on your site talking about the local area.
Lifestyle
Also known as psychographics, lifestyle targeting focuses on hobbies and interests. A person might be interested in music, for example, and could be segmented into professional, amateur, particular instruments, recording equipment, stereo equipment, and so on. While demographics explain about your customer, psychographics helps you understand why they would buy.
You need to know if they have some things that they love and won’t compromise on, or what they find fulfilling in life. That might seem like a tall order, but the better you get to know your audience the better you can sell to them. Remember, you are providing a solution to their problem, so you need to know what problem they are having. Do they want a healthy lifestyle but don’t seem to have time? You can talk about how your product saves time. But if you don’t mention that, your buyer isn’t even thinking it can work for them.
Behavioral Patterns To Segment Your Audience
This can be in terms of what brands this person typically buys, their buying cycle for items they need to buy regularly, and so on. The patterns can also include bargain basement shopping versus high-end, luxury shopping with no expense spared. These in some ways are like lifestyle traits, but it’s a little bit more about what their usual year, month, and week are like.
So if they have children that go to a school to learn (vs homeschooling), they might only take vacations during typical school breaks, like Christmas and Summer. You would need to know this about your customer if you are trying to sell them something related to taking time off and having a vacation. Or if they are homeschooled, what’s the reason they might travel? To do an educational trip? Focus on that value for your customers if they fit in that category when segmenting your audience.
Benefits-Based Segmentation
Every customer is looking for some way to make their lives easier and to even transform it for the better. A soccer mom’s idea of better, however, might be very different from that of a New York City socialite.
Benefit segmentation includes:
* Convenience
* Value
* Quality
* Status/prestige
A well-rounded marketing persona will have some data about each of these areas which can help you market more effectively to the various segments of your niche, helping you to personalize your marketing message. You need to layer this into your messages. And this is where segmenting really shines because you can talk in their language about things that they are interested in and how it fits into their life, and the customer feels like you are reading their mind!
Features versus Benefits
One of the most important ways you can use your marketing personas is when you write your sales letter and similar promotional material. Many marketers tend to give a shopping list of the features of their product without clearly stating the benefits. Don’t make your audience guess what’s in it for them — tell them upfront.
A good example would be car ads. They all list features like four-wheel drive, leather bucket seats, and so on. But what are the benefits of having these?
Four-wheel drive will help you handle almost any sort of terrain. It might also be safer in bad weather, such as rain and snow.
These details might not be important to a Manhattan socialite who rarely drives outside of the city, but it would be important information for people living in places that get a lot of snow. People who love off-road types of adventures would also find this an important selling point.
In terms of leather seats, they are sexy, sleek and stylish for a wealthy person, but durable, easy to clean, and kid- and pet-friendly to a busy soccer mom.
Create different versions of your sales letter for each persona, and A/B split test. Or, let Wildcat Brand Management do the work for you, so the right marketing message gets shown to the right person. When you are creating listings on Amazon, you can really talk to your ideal customer and make them feel great about your product when you understand your buyer. So let’s talk about how we can help you write listings that will convert and sell more of your products.