Audience Segmentation Tools for Mass Communications
How well do you know your audience? The best marketing campaigns are targeted to specific demographics providing information that’s relevant to their interests and in a language they can relate to and understand. Audience segmentation allows you to divide your audience into categories such as age, location, and purchasing behavior so you can target your communications to those groups. Before you can divide your audience, though, you need to gather information about them.
Audience segmentation tools in mass communications empower you to gather and analyze important data about your customers so you can thoughtfully categorize them in a way that makes sense for your business. We’ll walk you through the basics of audience segmentation and explain how different audience segmentation tools can help you target your marketing campaigns and improve your customer communications.
Examples of Audience Segmentation
You can segment your audience according to any category that makes sense for your business and customer base. Some typical audience segmentation categories include:
Demographics |
Geographics |
Behavioral |
Psychographics |
Age |
Urban |
Purchasing Behavior |
Benefits Sought |
Education |
Rural |
Stage of Change |
Values |
Occupation |
Peri-Urban/Suburban |
Frequency of Behavior |
Activities |
Family Size |
Region |
Consistency of Behavior |
Attitudes and Opinions |
Ethnicity/Language |
District |
Duration of Behavior |
Personality |
The more information you’re able to collect from your customers, the more successful your audience segmentation will be. Not every business needs to segment its audience the same way, but the typical segmentation categories provide a great jumping-off point for developing a strategy that works best for you and your customers. For example, understanding demographics like age and education can help you market specific products to students whereas behavioral segmentation can help you target loyal customers. Luckily, there are a variety of tools to help you get started with audience segmentation.
Top Audience Segmentation Tools in Mass Communications
The most successful audience segmentation strategies rely on tools to help collect and categorize customer information. Your business may benefit from some or all of the following audience segmentation tools.
Web Analytics
Web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, analyze the traffic to your website and allow you to track information like user demographics, geography, and browsing behavior. Web analytics give you valuable data about who’s visiting your landing pages, which you can use to segment your audience for mass communications. For example, if you notice that a lot of your visitors are browsing from certain cities or neighborhoods, you can target your marketing messages and advertisements to focus on those geographic locations.
Social Media Analytics
Social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, provide analytics to all business accounts. Social media analytics tools are similar to web analytics, allowing you to see who your audience is, where they’re from, and what their interests are. With this information, you can target your social media posts to appeal to your current audience or bring in new users who have similar interests.
CRM Platforms
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms store a variety of information about your customers, which makes them perfect tools for segmenting audiences. Many CRM platforms will automatically segment your clients into common groupings (like location, age, or purchasing behavior), but you can also analyze customer data yourself to come up with more specific or creative ways to segment your users.
Surveys
Customer surveys are a great way to get more psychographic information about your existing client base allowing you to target your communications to their interests. You can also use the information from customer surveys to inform how you seek out and advertise to new clients. Surveys are a powerful tool for audience segmentation because you gain access to the kind of information you’d normally get from a one-on-one conversation but on a larger scale.
Most audience segmentation tools in mass communications aid in collecting information and analyzing that data to categorize your customers. You can use audience segmentation to communicate with customers in a variety of ways, including email and SMS (text) messages.
Using SMS With Audience Segmentation
One of the most powerful tools for audience segmentation is SMS messaging. You can use SMS to send surveys to your customers which allows you to collect valuable psychographic and behavioral data. With text-to-join, you can automatically segment your audience by creating custom keywords that clients use to subscribe to particular SMS communications. And once you’ve segmented your audience, you can use SMS to send personalized messages to your clients that are relevant to their needs and interests.
SMS messaging can be used in conjunction with other audience segmentation tools to improve your mass communications as well. For instance, if your web analytics platform indicates that many of your regular customers are abandoning a particular item in their shopping cart, you can use SMS to send them a discount code for that item encouraging them to complete the sale. Or if you see that your recent Instagram post is doing well among a certain age group, you could use SMS to share it with subscribers in the same demographic segment. There are many creative ways to target text message campaigns using data from your audience segmentation tools, and the only limit is your imagination.
Ready to learn more about how SMS works with audience segmentation tools in mass communications? NorthText provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use SMS delivery platform that supports surveys, auto-responders, and unlimited keywords for text-to-join. Contact us today, or call or text (312) 869-9070anytime to find out more.