Segment Your Target Audience For More Effective Digital And Social Media Marketing.

How to segment your social media and digital media target audiences
~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

A recent Adobe survey of business leaders indicates “better use of data for more effective audience segmentation and targeting” as a top priority for marketing. What is it and how do you do it?

Qualtrics defines market segmentation as “the practice of dividing your market into approachable groups … subsets of a market based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other psychographic or behavioral criteria used to better understand the target audience.”

Segmentation provides real benefits as 81% of executives say it is crucial to growing their profits. Segmentation can increase response rates and lower acquisition costs with:

  • More specific messages that resonate with customer’s wants and needs.
  • More personal messages that help brands stand out from the competition.
  • More targeted advertising to those most likely to convert to customers.

Once a business defines their target market or the specific group of people they will focus their products and services on they establish various target audiences to focus their marketing messages. There are further benefits in segmenting the target audience.

How do you segment your audience?

Consider an amusement park promoting tickets sales for the upcoming season. Their core target market is most likely adults 25-45 will children living at home. They would be the group most likely to plan and purchase tickets for immediate and extended family trips to the park.

Segment your audience into groups to score better results with each message you send.

 

First determine your general message.

Most businesses need to create general awareness before consideration by customers. Brand ads do this well.

An amusement park builds overall brand awareness through traditional TV, radio, print and billboard ads. These ads have a general theme showing kids, adults, grandparents and teens having fun at the park. This would appeal to their core target audience of adults with children planning family trips and looking to make sure the park has something for everyone.

Mass media must have broad appeal in messaging and imagery. In digital and social media there is opportunity to customize messages, imagery and offers.

Brainstorm audience segments.

Based on your knowledge of the target audience consider possible differences in wants and needs within the group. The amusement park may want to look at stage of life and location.

People in different stages of life may want different experiences at the park:

  • Adults with young children (age 25-34)
  • Adults with pre-teens/tweens (age 35-45)
  • High school/college students (age 13-24)
  • Grandparents (age 55+)

People who live different distances from the park may plan different types of trips:

  • Multi-visit locals (Within 40 miles)
  • Day trippers (40 to 100 miles)
  • Over nighters (Over 100 miles)

Consider content for each segment.

Now see if your segments make a difference in content. Determine how the messages, imagery and offers could differ for each of the segment’s needs.

Parents with young children would probably respond to content focused on smaller rides. Parents with elementary and middle school kids would look for more exciting attractions. High school and college students hang out with friends and take on the big roller coasters. Grandparents want see their grandchildren on rides while being able to sit and rest enjoying shows and restaurants.

With the geographic segments messaging and offers could get more focused. People within 40 miles would be most interested in season passes whether talking to families, teens or grandparents. People 40 to 100 miles away are most likely interested in day trips. Those over 100 miles away may want to know about other area attractions and park plus hotel packages for a multi-day trip.

Plan out content combinations.

Now plan out a content segment grid. Link various segments together to determine how many content variations you need.

Based on the amusement park brainstorming we have identified 12 market segments (4 X 3 = 12). Four are based on age and family demographics and three are based geographic variables. In a social media or display advertising campaign each of these 12 segments could be targeted with a unique message, image and promotional offer.

How to segment your social media and digital media target audiences
Link audience segments together to determine possible content variations.

Consider your CRM data.

Most companies have customer relationship management (CRM) databases that could add another layer of segmentation. Look at that data for meaningful segments. This could help you rule out segments or find additional ones.

The amusement park could use their CRM to discover that the market for grandparents purchasing tickets is fairly small and decide not to target them. Their adult children tend to plan and purchase tickets for trips where the parents, younger children and grandparents come together. The data reveals parents purchase tickets for the high school and college students yet they often go to the park with friends. Thus, that audience may still be a worthwhile target as they influence the decision.

From these narrowed down segments the amusement park could send emails out to past customers with the segmented communications we’ve identified. Then from their email data they could create a remarketing campaign through custom audiences in social media and display advertising.

Unique remarketing messages could target email subscribers who:

  • Did not open the email
  • Opened the email but did not click
  • Clicked to the website but didn’t purchase

From the CRM database they also know how often people visit per year. They could target previous season ticket holders and people who visited three times on individual tickets with different season ticket messages.

They also know who has gone to concerts at the park amphitheater. They could target people who have been to concerts but not to the amusement park with a concert and park ticket package message, image and offer.

Additional possible segments from CRM data:

  • Previous season ticket holders
  • People who purchased 3 individual trips
  • People who purchased concert tickets

Look at your customer journey.

In any business their is a unique customer journey where customers move through various pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages. People in these different stages tend to seek different information.

Consider additional segments to target people in each of these stages with different content. This could include brand awareness, product, sales promotion, customer service, loyalty and advocacy messages.

When creating online social, video and display ads services such as YouTube and Google Advertising allow intent targeting for more relevant messages. Tara Walpert-Levy of Brand Solutions at Google explains it this way:

Let’s take the example of someone interested in buying a winter coat. To date, if you wanted to target video ads for winter coats, you could guess a demographic that might be more likely to buy winter coats (say, women 18 to 34) or use psychographics to target people who might be particularly into preparing for winter (say, ski enthusiasts). Intent signals eliminate that guesswork. You can serve ads to people who searched for winter coat deals, spent a lot of time scouting nearby ski resorts, or scrolled through coats in a shopping app.

Mobile campaigns that used intent-based targeting were found to have 20% higher ad recall and 50% higher brand awareness lift versus demographic targeting alone.

Create your content for each segment.

Once you have your audience segments you are ready to create your unique content. As seen in the chart above some will require only one customization while other contact may require customizing message, image and offer. Cristina Caligiuri and Ben Jones of Google’s Unskippable Labs have run experiments in testing how much you should customize in video ads. Across all forms of content be sure to follow best practices for content writing and design. Then run with it!

Measure results and optimize.

Going through this process you will most likely end up with many possibilities. Keep in mind that it is probably not worth segmenting messages to them all. Not every additional segment you create will produce significant improvements.

That is why you must measure results and optimize along the way. If the segment doesn’t increase conversions, stop using it and try something else. But the fact is segmentation works. A recent brand loyalty study found 75% of emails opened most frequently contain segmentation.

The amusement park may discover conversion on targeting multi-day trips to high school/college students over 100 miles away is too low. Instead they might try targeting adults 25-34 without kids for overnight park and concert trips.

How can you segment your target audience for improved results?

Social Media Career Guide: What You Can Do And Where You Can Do It.

~ K. Quesenberry ~ 3 Comments

Demand for employees with social media skills has increased with many new possibilities:

  • McKinley Marketing Partners reports the top in-demand skill is digital marketing including social media skills.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic has made social media more important.
  • CMO Survey found social media spending increased from 13% to 23% of marketing budgets in 2020.
  • Marketers say they plan to keep that increase in 2021.
Social Media Jobs Are Growing
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Social media has gone from one person’s side job to full-time and specialized positions within companies and in marketing communications firms. Share on X Below is a guide to help you consider the different roles that may match your interest and skills and work environment you prefer.

Social Media Strategy Jobs

Social media strategists plan a social media strategy, ensuring it connects to larger objectives and integrates marketing, advertising, and public relations. Strategists utilize tools like social media audits to improve social media content and measure performance to report results to management. Social media marketing managers are more action oriented with creating and executing social media strategy for overall brand presence and specific campaigns. At larger organizations people under them help with implementation and day-to-day tasks. At smaller organizations social media managers may also implement the strategy they manage.

Social Media Engagement Jobs

Some roles are more on the front lines of social media. Social media community managers foster social media communities built around a brand. They monitor and respond to conversations across social media platforms or are assigned to specific social networks. Social media coordinators plan, implement, and monitor a brand’s social media strategy working with content creators, internal departments, and external partners to measure and improve performance. Social media specialists focus on implementation of social media strategy, writing copy for social posts, scheduling social content, and tracking KPIs while staying up to date on the latest trends.

Social Media Content Creation Jobs

Other social media roles are focused on creating social content. Social media copywriters plan, create, and analyze channel-specific brand social media written content, build content calendars, write brand guidelines, and find internal and external sources for content. Social media graphic designers create and maintain visual brand assets and find and create appropriate images and graphics for various social media channels. Social media video specialist capture, edit, and produce videos for brand assets and specific social media channels.

Social Media Specialists Jobs

Some social media roles are oriented toward more specialized areas. Influencer relations managers identify, build, and manage relationships with celebrity, macro, and micro influencers to create and share brand social media content. Social media analysts focus on social media measurement developing systems, processes, and reporting to gather and analyze social metrics to make better decisions and optimize strategies, tactics, and content. A journalist social media content developer uses journalism skills to promote news brands or create news-style content for corporate brands in social media.

Besides specific social media roles, there are various types of organizations within which social media professionals can work. The CMO Survey reports that 3/4ths of social media activities are performed inside a company and 1/4th are performed by outside agencies. Share on X What are the options for outside agencies?

Marketing Communications Firms

Many marketers and brand managers hire outside communications firms to create and execute their integrated marketing communications campaigns. Some firms have changed over the years to call themselves integrated marketing communications agencies. Yet, they traditionally have come from companies focused on advertising and public relations. Both disciplines and agencies have increased their social media services over the years and thus require social media specialists.

Advertising agencies are hired by marketers to create, produce, and manage paid commercial messages through TV, outdoor, ratio, print, digital, and social marketing to promote products and services. Ad agencies can be hired to produce a single ad campaign or may be agency of record for a brand, providing multiple integrated services in an ongoing relationship. As a brand partner they provide strategy, implementation, and measurement. Today, any position in an advertising agency is required to have digital and social media knowledge and there are many specific social media positions.

Public relations agencies are hired by marketers to create, produce, and manage unpaid messages to the public through media to change public actions by influencing opinions. PR agencies often provide services to their clients such as strategy development, messaging, media relations, content marketing, social media marketing, event planning, crisis communication, and influencer relations. Today, social media is seen as the number one skill required for public relations new hires.

Specialized Agencies

In 2019 digital media ad spending surpassed traditional media for the first time. With digital representing 54% of all US ad spending the growth in digital marketing specialized agencies as followed suit. There are digital marketing agencies that include social media services and social media agencies that focus on social media strategy and implementation.

Digital marketing agencies are hired by marketers to create, produce, and manage brands through digital media including website, mobile, and digital ads to promote products and services. Digital agencies often focus on services such as website design and development, apps, search engine optimization, search and display advertising, social media and email marketing, content creation, online lead generation, plus mobile apps and campaigns. With the increase in social media spending digital agencies are increasing their social media services and hiring more social media specific roles.

Social media agencies are hired by marketers to create, produce, and manage the presence of a brand through social media channels such as social networks, messaging apps, blogs and forums, podcasts, ratings, and reviews. Social media agencies focus on social media strategy, content creation, community management, paid social advertising, influencer engagement, social listening, measurement and monitoring, promotions, and crisis management. They have grown into significant companies with many employees in physical offices or through virtual collaboration.

Social Media Self Employment

There is also a growing option where social media professionals work for themselves. Social media freelancers provide the services of specific social media roles on a project or campaign rather than as a full-time employee. This could also be called a social media solopreneur. A solopreneur is an entrepreneur who runs a business without full-time employees. This often means working virtually from home with more flexibility in your schedule.

Companies or Organizations

Many social media positions today are hired in-house at the company or organization, working directly in or with the marketing department. The marketing department in an organization promotes the business and drives sales of products and services. This could be a separate social media role or within an in-house marketing communications department. A social media professional at a company could also be housed in the corporate communications department which manages a company’s reputation and develops communications plans with stakeholders.

Some companies create a separate social media department that works with other departments including marketing, communications, sales, customer service, and human resources to plan and implement cross-discipline social media strategies. Finally, journalists could be hired for social media content developer roles for news organizations.

The great opportunity with social media positions within companies or organizations is to marry your social media skills with your passion for another field. Share on X Perhaps you love sports. You could look for social media jobs at sports teams, leagues, college athletic departments, or e-sports brands. Or perhaps you are into fashion. You could look for social media positions at fashion brands or fashion retailers. No matter your interest, from cars and tech to health and nonprofit causes, brands in that field need social media professionals.

Which position and type of organization are you best suited for?

To get better idea of specific responsibilities and opportunities: