Jo, our Client Delivery & Operations Lead, supports the team to ensure we deliver the best possible outcome for our clients.
With a diverse background of experience incorporating retail, professional services businesses, technology and health care, Jo helps the team to deliver forward thinking marketing strategies and keep things on track.
It’s well documented that, as consumers, we’re exposed to hundreds, if not thousands of marketing messages every single day*. And as new communication channels emerge, competition for our attention grows with it. Which makes relevance and targeting more important than ever. Yet why is it that many brands still try to speak to “everyone”, forgetting the essential step of understanding their audience?
When our Head of Content and Innovation, the wonderful Georgina Walls, asked me to write about customer segmentation and targeting I was delighted. It’s a topic close to my heart, and one that’s been central throughout my career.
So, it was a pleasure to share some thoughts on why I believe segmentation remains such a fundamental part of successful marketing.
In the context of seeing thousands of messages daily, think about the last marketing message that genuinely caught your attention. Chances are it didn’t feel random or generic. It probably stood out because it either:
1. resonated with your interests, hobbies or priorities
2. was relevant to something happening in your life at that time
Sometimes content captures attention because it aligns with something you enjoy, other times it appears at exactly the moment when you need it.
Now let’s think about the opposing side of that coin. What about the mass of emails you delete instantly, the ads you scroll past without watching or reading, or the campaigns that are so broad it’s unclear who they are aimed at? In these examples, nothing about the content feels relevant to you – probably why you chose not to engage with it.
This is what happens when brands try to speak to everyone at once.
The intention may be to reach the largest possible audience, but the reality is the message becomes so diluted it lands well with no-one. On paper it seems a safer bet; a bigger audience should mean bigger results, but the reality is broader the message, the narrower the impact and the smaller the results.
I will caveat that last point by saying that there are, of course, times where mass marketing plays an important role, and when used correctly it’s a highly effective mechanism, but it’s a strategy typically reserved for specific moments (that often have big budgets and objectives associated with it) rather than an always-on strategy that will ultimately burn limited resources and budget.
Great marketing doesn’t start with the channel, creative concept, message or proposition. It actually starts with something much simpler: understanding who you’re speaking to and why – in a nutshell it starts with your audience!
And this is where customer segmentation becomes essential. It allows marketers to move beyond broad assumptions and generic messaging and towards more relevant and targeted campaign planning.
At the same time, the growth of data-driven marketing and tracking means there is now a wealth of information available (something of a proverbial sweet shop for marketers). This abundance of data enables the creation of more meaningful and precise customer segments, making segmentation a more powerful tool than ever before.
With access to behavioural, demographic and engagement data, the real challenge is using it sensibly to build a deeper understanding of audiences; their motivations, behaviours, interests and needs, and turning that understanding into insights that drive better, more effective communication.
In its simplest form, audience segmentation moves marketers from broad audiences to more specific groups with shared characteristics. For example, a mass audience of “women” might become a target market of women aged 25–35, and then a more defined segment such as women aged 25–35 interested in health and fitness.
The goal isn’t simply to categorise people, but to understand the differences between audiences so communications, messaging and channels can be tailored accordingly.
But segmentation isn’t just about sorting people into tidy categories. One of the biggest misconceptions is the idea that customers fit neatly into one single category. In reality, people (read customers) are far more complex than that.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of associating people/customers with one clearly defined segment, but audiences are far more dynamic than that. For example: Someone can be both budget-conscious about everyday purchases yet happily invest in premium experiences such as travel or events.
Equally, people don’t necessarily have a consistent approach across areas of their live; a work-based persona and personal approach can be very different, for example. Even when people do follow similar traits, it’s still possible to sit in multiple segments at the same time.
If I think about just a handful of the traits which determine different segments, I personally fall into:
Which is why, when marketing assumes customers have one single, static identity and that customers belong solely to one segment (a one size fits all approach if you will), it misses the nuances that drive interaction and is destined to fail.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of associating people/customers with one clearly defined segment, but audiences are far more dynamic than that. For example: Someone can be both budget-conscious about everyday purchases yet happily invest in premium experiences such as travel or events.
Equally, people don’t necessarily have a consistent approach across areas of their live; a work-based persona and personal approach can be very different, for example. Even when people do follow similar traits, it’s still possible to sit in multiple segments at the same time.
If I think about just a handful of the traits which determine different segments, I personally fall into:
Which is why, when marketing assumes customers have one single, static identity and that customers belong solely to one segment (a one size fits all approach if you will), it misses the nuances that drive interaction and is destined to fail.
It can of course be easy (and tempting) to assume that if people belong to multiple segments, the safest approach therefore is simply to communicate everything to everyone. But this is rarely effective, and often a costly mistake.
Understanding how segments overlap allows us to think more carefully about which messages resonate with which audience. So rather than relying on that broad, one-size-fits-all approach, marketers can develop relevant and targeted communications that will resonate more strongly.
Let’s bring this to life by way of an example: the Apple iPhone.
In reality, many consumers fall into more than one of these segments at the same time, but Apple’s layered approach allows these motivations to reinforce each other, so that if a single customer encounters multiple versions they work seamlessly conveying the different reasons why the product is relevant to them .
A similar strategy can be seen by fellow BCorp Tony’s Chocoloney, (who made our favourite BCorp list twice in a recent LinkedIn post). The brand anchors its positioning around a clear purpose (ending exploitation in the cocoa industry) and markets to different segments through a mix of storytelling, product design and packaging whilst keeping the core mission prominent.
Again, in reality as with Apple, customers engage with the brand through multiple touchpoints and have many different motivations; so by communicating different aspects of the brand across different channels, Tony’s allows a single consumer to connect with the product for these different reasons all at the same time.
When the product or brand doesn’t change, but the way it is positioned and communicated adapts to the motivations of the audience, messages and campaigns resonate.
And it’s when brands understand these differences, that marketing even on a large scale such as an Apple iPhone launch stops feeling generic and starts to become genuinely relevant. The result isn’t just more effective campaigns; it’s stronger relationships with audiences who feel seen and understood; and from a loyalty point of view start to build a connection with the brand. When attention is being demanded from multiple messages and touchpoints across every inch of the day, it’s this understanding that helps with cut through and makes a personal connection.
At its core, customer segmentation is about recognising that audiences are made up of individuals with multiple motivations, interests and priorities that often overlap and sometimes even contradict one another.
Great marketing begins with understanding and using this insight to create communications that feel relevant, meaningful and personal. It may not always look and feel like one-to-one communication, but it should feel much closer to that than one-to-many broadcasting.
And while segmentation is the first step, the real challenge lies in delivering it at scale. In our next blog, Georgina and I will explore how AI can help marketers scale segmentation and deliver personalised experiences without losing the human touch.
* Read here for an interesting look at how the marketing and advertising industry, and the message growth, has changed over the years.
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