Using Data to Segment and Target your Audience

Image Credit: Jeff Sheldon / Caption: Know where your customers spend their time

Data is all-important when it comes to successfully targeting your customers. There are many things that you can find out about them, even just from how they use your website. You can understand what kind of products they buy and what their browsing behavior is like. You can also discover their age, location, and perhaps occupation. Through social media or other sources of data, you can discover their other interests, whether they are a parent, what they search for, what they buy, and where on the internet they spend most of their time. All of this can be extremely useful.

Behavior
Behavior is, first of all, a very important factor. You need to be able to market your product in a place where your customer will see it. If you know that your customers spend a lot of time on Facebook, for example, then you may invest in advertisements on this platform.

It is also important to know where they go when they look at your site. Do they head straight to a certain page, or come in through the homepage? Perhaps special offers and new products may be ignored if visitors are bypassing the homepage, meaning that you need to make them more prominent on other pages as well.

Desires
What your customer desires is the key to knowing what they will buy. Your task is to sell them exactly what they want, even if only in a broad sense. For example, if someone is a parent, you may present your product to them as an asset because it will help them to be able to spend more time with their family.

On the other hand, if your time-saving product is being sold to a young business owner who is single and dedicated to their start-up, then you might instead sell it to them as a product which will help their business to grow quicker. The product is the same – only the marketing message is personalized.

Support
It is absolutely essential to follow your customer through every part of their relationship with your company, and ensure that their needs are well met. With a CRM you can set up marketing automation so that a customer receives an email after they sign up to your site, after they purchase something, and so forth.

It’s also important to keep an eye on their experience as a whole. Having a central data hub for customer information means that you can check back on prior support requests, complaints, and orders to give them a thorough and detailed response in all communication.

Answer
All potential customers will have objections about using your service or buying your product. Your job is to use the data to understand your customers and then answer those objections before they arise. You can, for example, run a survey to find out why customers did not buy on a particular occasion.

Let’s say the young business owner feels that your service is too expensive for them. To combat this, market it to them in a personalized way as being something that will save them money over time and help to build better profits.

Data can be used to significantly increase your sales if you know what you are doing. Give the right message to your potential customers in the right place, and support them through every step of their relationship with your brand, and you will find sales figures rising. This is a delicate process, and almost impossible to do without the proper use of data and a CRM. Once you get it right, your sales will go through the roof almost immediately.

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5 Simple Ways to Segment Your Social Media Audience

"How can I get more leads from social media?"

This is a question I get often from marketers who are struggling to find and prove the value of social media to their business. Generally, it's followed by an explanation of the various social media tactics they have tried to address this concern. Maybe they'll publish more often or change up the type of content they share. Maybe they'll engage with industry experts on the platform. They might even try hosting a live chat or event. 

The one thing most of them aren't doing? Segmenting their audience on social media. 

Segmentation is not a new concept for marketers. We use segmentation to send emails, create pricing models, and understand the behaviors of our most loyal buyers -- so why aren’t we applying this practice to social media?

To get some ideas for ways you can use segmentation in your social media strategy, keep on reading.

1) Use social media targeting.  

When most people think of social media segmentation, they think of paid targeting options. Facebook allows businesses to target their messages to users based on data such as user demographics, interests, and geographical location. Other platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram have followed suit. Paid targeting is effective because it enables companies to get a specific message in front of a specific audience.

Lucky for budget-minded marketers, there are also some organic targeting options. Below are ways you could make use of both organic and paid targeting tactics.

Organic

Organic targeting allows users to tailor their content to specific audiences without paying to promote a post. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ make it easy for companies to do organic targeting.

Facebook

Facebook allows you to filter by gender, relationship status, age, location, interests and more. Simply create your post and select the target audience of your choice.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to target by industry, company size, function and more. This is a a great feature for B2B companies that are seeking to attract more visitors.

Google+

You can also select a specific audience on Google+ by publishing your content to a select circle of friends (you will need manually add members to the circle).

Paid

Paid targeting enables companies to be seen by social media users who are already active users and more likely to engage your offer and campaign. As a result, companies can increase their reach, expand their audience size, and achieve more quality conversions.

Almost all the social networks allow you to create targeted paid campaigns. Below is an example from Facebook -- you can target posts by gender, age, behavior, location and more. 

2) Create a group.

Social media is all about community. Building communities of people who share common interests is an easy way to segment your audience and gain valuable insights. You may decide to keep the group open (anyone can join) or closed (new members must be approved by a moderator) -- there are advantages to each.

Open groups enable you to gather information about how a more general audience feels about your brand. You can use this forum to have discussions and ask open-ended questions such as, “What are your biggest challenges?” or “What makes excellent customer service?” You can also test out new ideas with your audience members or discover new content ideas that they would find interesting and relevant. The advantage here is that you will have a large group to bounce ideas off of. The disadvantage? They may not be as knowledgeable about your industry as you need.

That's where closed groups can come in handy. Because you are approving each member's admission to the group, you can cherry-pick the most qualified candidates. Maybe they're a group of customers whose opinions you value, or list of people who have attended an even you've hosted. Regardless of what the requirements of admission, this can be a great way to get specific, helpful feedback from a group you trust -- but you may not get as many responses as an open group discussion.

3) Make a list.

Most marketers are familiar with creating lists -- we do that every time we send a new email campaign. 

But did you know you can use lists to have more productive social media conversations? Social networks like Facebook and Twitter allow users to create lists of friends, followers, people who have attended an event, and more.

If you're a HubSpot customer, the lists you use for your email can actually be one and the same as your social monitoring lists. (If you're curious about how to create one, check out this Academy help document.) This means that you could set up a stream for each of your buyer personas, a stream for leads who are talking about your brand, or customers in a certain industry. You'll spend much less time trying to filter through the noise, and much more time having relevant, targeted conversations. 

4) Post at different times of the day.

We’ve all heard how important timing is to marketing, especially on social media. If you have a global following, you should be publishing posts throughout the day at the times most appropriate for different geographic regions. Differentiating your publishing times allows you to get engagement from a larger portion of your audience. Additionally, publishing a message more than once or at different times of the day can help your reach a specific audience that you haven't reached before.

5) Maintain multiple social media accounts on each network.

As you become a better marketer and master ways to segment your audience, more and more people from all over the world are going to be interested in connecting with you through social media. At that point, you may find that the best way to consistently serve your audience relevant content is by setting up several social media accounts, each with a specific bent.

At HubSpot, we maintain more than five different Twitter accounts to provide content that is relevant to each segment of our audience. For example, @HubSpotAcademy is a channel that inbound marketers can use in order to learn how to be a better inbound marketer, while@HubSpotSupport is a channel that our customers can use to get help using the HubSpot platform. Both Twitter accounts are relevant to anyone interested in HubSpot, but they are most relevant to their particular segments.

Keep in mind that each social media account should still serve a larger audience, so be sure to work on building your overall audience from one account before you try building out more. Also, if you decide to start building out more accounts, be sure that people can easily differentiate their purpose (ex: customer support, marketing materials, your yearly event, etc.) -- otherwise, you'll be creating more work for yourself.

So there you have it, five ways to segment your social media audience for more relevant conversations -- and eventually, more conversions. 

How else do you segment your social media audience?

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