If you’ve ever tried to reach a specific demographic within your target audience with highly personalized content, you’ve employed a marketing strategy called audience segmentation.
Audience-segmentation strategy is the practice of splitting your audiences into smaller groups — or audience segments. The divisions are based on factors like age, geographic location, ethnicity, behavior, product usage, and their point in the customer journey.
By segmenting your audience and using tailored messaging in your marketing efforts, you’re far more likely to form messages that will motivate or engage key segments than if you create content that is aimed at reaching a much broader audience range. Why? The broad message tends to be too generic. Beyond that, the message must also be transmitted through the channels that each segment uses.
Audience segmentation can be applied in different ways by using insights about each unique subgroup. Not only can the strategy be applied to event marketing, but also in how events can be run.
When you analyze your audience and break it down into logical subsets, you can understand your customer base and the specific needs — or interests — of each segment.
The strategy enables you to identify your target audiences, tailor your messaging to each segment, meet a specific need to boost conversion rates, create a stronger connection with customers that fosters loyalty and brand trust, and ultimately, attract leads to advance your sales cycle.
The process generally begins with audience-based research aimed at understanding audience profiles. Doing such research will help determine segmentation and identify related pain points for each group. Once you understand who you’re trying to reach, you can tailor your messaging to better reach each segment.
In this section, we’ll use event marketing to show how to apply audience segmentation.
When you plan an event, understanding the goals for it is crucial to providing an ideal event experience. Is the goal sales, lead generation, networking, education? Chances are, different event attendees will have different goals in mind.
Knowing this, the first step is to research your market and potential attendees. You can do this in a number of ways, including distributing pre-event surveys that will give you important insights while generating excitement about the event. Use data you have from your last event to identify repeat attendees, and any insights you obtain from analyzing registered attendees. You can also set up marketing pixels on your event website to gather data on visitors, and research similar events in your industry to get an idea of its event audience and identify potential event attendees.
Once you’ve done all the research, use the gathered information to segment your audience. Segmentation types can be defined in a number of ways, including:
Now it’s time to create messaging to reach specific audience segments that interact with your event website. Here are examples you can use in your event’s marketing to reach key groups at just the right time.
In this section, we will look at four ways to use segmentation to interact with the audience during your event. Tools — such as the ones MeetingPulse provides — help to do just that.
As we’ve discussed, defining audience segments can help you learn so much more about the people who engage with your brand. It also makes it possible to identify potential or loyal customers and foster stronger connections with each group with tailored messaging. MeetingPulse can connect you with tools and methods that help meeting planners and presenters take advantage of the powers of audience segmentation.