In Affiliate Marketing there is one mantra that is often repeated – this is something along the lines of IT’S ALL IN THE LIST.
Building a list can be a complicated process. After all, a good marketer will no doubt cover an array of different topics and what this means is each new lead will have varying different interests.
Exactly, Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience!
If we think of choosing a niche, in the beginning, the best advice really for anyone is to choose one that is not too broad and not too narrow. We will want to go as narrow as possible but to the degree where we still have the opportunity to find new ideas for content. It should be that after a while we will expand into different categories…
…Which is really my point – when this happens our audience begins to split into different factions.
Hence why you should segment your target audience. As a means to improve customer engagement within your business. This allows you to send personalized sub-niche specific marketing content to the right groups.
It really is a great way to keep things relevant to your leads and will no doubt give them what they actually want more often than not.
I will give an example you make a website called coolpets.com and you create content about cats, dogs and horses. If you send an email out about cat toys to a horse owner who doesn’t have a cat this will likely NOT be relevant to them
It’s definitely why if you are not using segmentation already you really should, and this is very much what we will discuss in today’s blog post. Please keep reading Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience to learn more.
Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience
Table of Contents
Already, you likely have some idea what this post is going to be about. Segmentation is where you separate your leads and customers into different groups. This is done so that when you contact them to share things like new content and offers you can take more care about what information you are sending them.
There are many reasons why segmentation works and this is what I will be sharing with you today.
So Let’s begin here…
i.) To Better Understand Your Audience
To really get a plan underway for using segmentation within your marketing efforts you must first define your target audience first. Understanding who these people are and what has brought them to you is the fundamental information you need to begin using segmentation within your marketing campaigns.
Like, I demonstrated a scenario where someone is messaging a horse owner about cat toys. This is the kind of thing that happens quite a lot within broader niches. Some marketers just message everyone and hope for the best.
Really it’s an innocent mistake and one that a lot of people that don’t use segmentation make. Even though this is something that could prove costly to your levels of customer engagement.
It might even be that you don’t lose this contact but they may get fed up with receiving irrelevant information and as a result ignore your emails even when they are relevant to them.
You kind of get the picture. People don’t like having their time wasted. Not even a few minutes. Exactly why segmentation works. By doing this you can create hyper-targeted messages that resonate with the correct people.
*For this to work create different buyer personas to attract different customers to different lists.
…. and on another note…
ii.) Use Native Social Media Targeting Tools
When we think about Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience we will think about what happens on our websites and how we collect leads from there but what we should also consider is Social Media for sharing relevant content to the right groups of people and as a list building tool.
In fact, further to this, we might think that when it comes to finding these sub-niche specific leadswe will have to pay for targeting tools. However, the best part is that there are many free targeting tools on various social media platforms.
Just take Facebook for example. Their search bar alone can target your audience based on geographical location, demographics, and interests. You can easily find groups and posts to comment on and potential friends to contact.
Also, if you are on LinkedIn, here you can filter your audience based on industry and even company size, all for free.
And the list goes on. Pinterest, Reddit and Quora are other platforms with similar resources available.
Just decide on what you want your sub-niches to be and…
iii.) Develop An Audience List
Many affiliate marketers will be familiar with using lists of various kinds. For example, a lot of content creators will use a pre-developed list to send out their marketing campaigns.
However, what some marketers may not know is they could use this same audience list to create more engagement with their followers.
Which is the next point Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience. So you can start producing these audience lists. Of course to begin you should consider developing a decent following first.
Using lead capture pages and offering something like a free ebook or report should be a great help in acheiving this. You can do this organically through widgets on your website or you can be a bit more proactive with social media.
Actually, some social media platforms will allow you to categorize your followers using different demographics.
On Twitter, for instance, there is a tool that lets you group your followers based on where they are in the buying process.
See More Here: Create a Followers Campaign On Twitter For Business<<<
iv.) Choose The Right Time To Post
So it’s pretty clear already Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience in digital marketing. I will cover this a bit more in the next section but another very important thing to consider is timing.
When marketing to your audience for better engagement you must choose the right time to post.
Especially with social media because people are online at different times.
Also, another thing to consider is your target niche. In this respect you might find that those based in different geographical locations either locally or around the world that their timezones are different.
For instance if your audience in the US when they are just waking up, those in Europe are likely going to bed.
Which is definitely something else to consider with segmentation. Of course you have your sub-niches but then taking this a step further you can tag people based on their location and personalize your campaigns to reach people at different times based on their geographical location.
By scheduling your marketing campaign to send at different times, you can ensure that your audience receives the message at the most appropriate time resulting in a much greater engagement.
V.) Streamline Your Marketing Activities
This goes a bit beyond Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience but still its something that is worth giving some thought at the very least. This is using the likes of social media tools to streamline your marketing efforts.
By using such tools you can in effect not only automate tasks to free up time for others but you can also create marketing campaigns that are specific to your target audience.
For example some tools will help you create ads whist also managing the segmentation of your audience with campaigns that can be set up from a single centralized location.
Plus what’s more, you can go even further and create more select custom audiences thus allowing you to segment your audience even more for greater engagment with more defined groups.
Using tags within your email marketing service providers. ConvertKit is one platform that really specializes in this. It will not allow you to set up more than one list as a free member but with this one list you can tag your contacts for different things.
So this is definitely one tool that you can use in this manner providing you have these tags for your contacts already set up.
Vi.) Test and Evaluate Your Performance
Again this is another that kind of is a bit bigger than Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience. This is something that should be done for a lot of things in many different areas of digital marketing but yes this is very relevant here.
So once you have actuallysegmented your audience and sent out your marketing campaigns you should have an understanding of what works and what does not. For good practice you should always evaluate how you perform with your different segmented campaigns.
I’ve definitely mentioned this in several posts already that A/B testing is a good way to find what works best.
For instance, let’s say you decide that your target audience is mainly on Facebook. You will want to know what demographics are more interested. You might find more men respond than women or vice versa.
A/B Testing allows you to cherry pick from these different groups and form a basis for more definitive campaigns. It is something you have to get used to yes but once you do you should be thankful for the results.
Final Word
I remember when I first started getting leads in my first year of internet marketing. As great as the feeling was it was in a sense kind of confusing. I only had one list for everything and my website (not this one) covered kind of a lot of different things. So I wasn’t really completely sure about how to market to this list effectively.
I mean it kind of sucked because it got to the stage that what I was doing worked. One of my forms I set up had people signing up for this list but unfortunately I never knew what to do after this happened.
Now, it is kind of different I know that with online software such as ConvertKit and even GetResponse know allows tagging that I can effectively do things differently.
You hear people that say email marketing doesn’t work in the modern day but this is really what you want to do. The reasons Why You Should Segment Your Target Audience are clear now more than ever.
For any business that has identified the right audience, it will be clear that within each audience are distinct communities.
In this respect Good Market segmentation allows you to send tailored messages and campaigns that improve conversions and increase revenue. So don’t forget about this it might seem small but this is very important…
You Feedback
On a final note I hope you have found todays new post helpful. If you have any questions, would like to share your thoughts or leave feedback please do so in the comments section below.
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Best wishes #ToYourFutureSuccess
Alex B. Chivers
iBusinessToday.com
Contact Us at: Chivs86@ibusinesstoday.com
One final thing to note if you run a blog yourself and struggle with ideas for content something you might want to consider is ViralityContent.com. This post at least partially I was able to write as an expansion of one of the articles from this content subscription. All big niches covered – find out more here<<<
