When it comes to marketing, the first thing you need to realize is that you can’t target all the subsets of the population, since this will not only rake in higher costs, but it will also prevent you from establishing a relationship with one specific, loyal group. The same goes for using the same marketing practices for everyone, which has proved to be counterproductive to brands all over the world.
This is where digital marketing segmentation enters the picture – allowing brands to observe customer preferences through their demographic data, geographic location, and lifestyle. This strategy is highly beneficial for the different avenues of marketing, like email marketing and SEM in Hong Kong since brands will be able to target specific groups of people through personalized ads and interaction. To help you better understand this practice, we’ve come up with this easy-to-understand explainer.
What Is Digital Marketing Segmentation?
Digital marketing segmentation refers to segmenting audiences and potential customers based on specific characteristics, such as their location, behavior, age, and occupation, allowing marketers to better understand customer behavior and come up with campaigns specially designed for smaller subgroups. Some of the benefits of audience segmentation in digital marketing are:
Marketers Are Given Smaller, Easy-to-Handle Consumer Groups
By segmenting audiences, brand marketers can tailor-fit strategies depending on audience preferences instead of relying on approaches targeted to the general population. This ensures that consumers are given specialized user experiences driving brand awareness or conversion.
Personalization of Marketing Materials is Made Easier
Audience segmentation for digital marketing helps marketers develop user personas and provide specific subpopulations only the information relevant to them. This makes the user experience better and more targeted, promoting better audience interaction for email marketing, content marketing, and SEM.
Brands Can Target Subpopulations With the Buying Power
One of the driving motivations of brands when it comes to digital marketing is their ability to convert, whether through email sign-ups or through purchases. By employing digital marketing segmentation, brands can target audiences who have enough finances to make purchases through their online shops or through offline transactions.
Types of Customer Segmentation for Digital Marketing
There are four ways that digital marketers segment their audience and potential customers, depending on specific characteristics and criteria. These include:
Demographic Segmentation
This refers to the digital marketing segmentation that depends on demographic variables, such as age, gender, religion, nationality, income, education, and marital status. For example, different industries choose to target subsets of the population with a higher chance of conversion. This is highly observed in real estate and automobile industries, where brands market their products depending on customer age groups, occupation, and income.
Geographic Segmentation
Geographic segmentation separates customers depending on their distance to stores and shops, their location’s climate and time zone, and the languages used. By being familiar with your customer’s locations, you can improve their user experience by marketing products that are relevant to their geographic locations.
This audience segmentation for digital marketing may be highly beneficial for email marketing in Hong Kong, since Hong Kong features a multilingual population. By having the means to properly segment the population, brands can specifically target audiences depending on the languages that they’re speaking or they’re comfortable with.
Behavioral Segmentation
Behavioral segmentation is crucial for digital marketing since audiences and customers mostly interact online through websites and online stores. With behavioral segmentation, you’re basically dividing customers depending on their online habits, behavioral patterns, and content preferences. This gives brands a better background on how to approach new customers and retarget repeat consumers.
Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic segmentation is probably one of the most effective online marketing segmentation types since you can easily target audiences based entirely on their interests and lifestyle choices, be it through sports, recreation, activism, or travel preferences. Some of the best brands in the global market are the best proponents of psychographic segmentation, since they know who their target market is and which platforms their potential consumers are in.
However, not a lot of brands in Hong Kong are reaping the benefits of digital marketing segmentation, with only 43% of global implemented campaigns being properly segmented. This makes it a crucial step to one-up your competitors since you’ll be able to properly and successfully launch marketing campaigns based on your customers’ behavior and preferences.
Audience Segmentation in Digital Marketing Depending on Consumer History
Aside from the segmentation approaches mentioned above, there are two other audience segmentations that digital marketers employ to divide their customers into two categories:
Actual Customers
Actual customers refer to the people who are bent on making purchases or signing up to services being advertised on the internet. These customers typically search with highly specific keywords, which makes them one of the best subpopulations to target if you’re pushing for conversions. To properly target these audiences, you must combine geographic, demographic, and behavioral characteristics to make your campaigns as relevant as possible.
However, while actual customers don’t need the additional nudge to buy, they usually need relevant information that will make them choose your brand over your competitors. In addition, after a purchase is made, you’d want to promote brand loyalty to keep them coming back. This may be in the form of a membership sign-up, a newsletter, or exclusive promos only offered to returning customers.
Potential Customers
Potential customers refer to the passive searchers who are only browsing for prospective purchases without a specific product in mind. Unlike actual customers, this marketing segment requires an additional nudge from you to make them decide if they want to take a step further and purchase. These nudges may be in the form of targeted ads, coupons, and discount vouchers – some of the most effective offerings that can push your audience into making a purchase.
Employ Effective Digital Marketing Segmentation With Truelogic HK
For digital marketing beginners, segmentation might seem like a complicated task, especially when you’re not familiar with the tools and techniques needed to properly segment your target audience. To remove the guesswork and the trial-and-error portion of marketing, partner with Truelogic HK, one of the leading digital marketing consulting agencies in Hong Kong. With marketing and development experts specializing in different strategies, we can help you navigate through digital marketing segmentation and other techniques to promote your brand better.
