How to use Segmentation & Targeting to develop digital marketing strategies?

In the Data Driven Digital Era, Segmentation and Targeting in digital is important. It’s also an important pillar for planning out the marketing strategy. Targeting strategies is the first foremost activities to be done in digital marketing strategies. To make things practical, am going to use one of the product we have built as an example, Tradly. 

Tradly is a Non-profit social marketplace which allow people to Trade and Donate.  

When we develop this product, 

• Our first job is to indentify for whom we are building the product (persona Analysis), 
• The different type of segments when our persona is more than one (segmentation) and 
• Finally use this insights to setup targeting whether we planning contents to write, targeting option in Facebook ads, targeting option in Google Search ads, or looking for partnership to work with, etc. 

Persona Analysis

There are already lot of articles which go deep in preparing a persona analysis. However the main fundamentals point to consider are

• Their demographics (age and gender) 
• Geographics (location , might be by city) 
• What sort of Brands they are interested mostly 
• Their job role or educational level
• May be relationship status
• The list of problems they face 
• Or the list of opportunities they are looking  for

• 

We will see how each of the above points could help you in the targeting strategy. Once you have this basic information you could able to plan things in proper way that can improve your efforts and reduce waste of time and money. 

Am going to also share few strategise that could shape your mindset on planning marketing strategies.

Push Based vs Pull Based Marketing & channels

From the image itself you could find some contradictory information. I have shared those images and so it’s easy for you to find the difference. In my definition of push based vs pull based is basically if you write or publish something that is available online where people come to you to consume that it is pull based(Like Google search). Push based is even though you know certain information or product user is needed, you go where they spent time and pushing that (Example: advertising in Facebook)

So when you go for pull based marketing, your efforts are one time(bit continuous improvement) and long term. For example when you prepare a evergreen content that brings value to your customers and potential customers, people would be always search or from social share keep coming to this content. 

There are certain cases where you cannot rely only on pull based marketing. For example: New product innovation, There wasn’t power bank for mobile phone before and that means people won’t be searching for that product on that first year. So you need to Bring this innovation to people by advertising on push based showing to people that there is a new product. However if you purely rely on advertising based mode you need to keep bleeding money at every time. Even if you are making small return on investment from the advertising spend, it doesn’t mean you can keep spending. You can implement pull based marketing on certain scale that can reduce your cost to advertise.

Targeting in Digital

So now you know how your target profile look like, where they are and what you love to do. When you can imagine all this people faces, you will eventually get to understand how you can target this. 

On additional to this profile analysis, you could think from different perspective as well. While we are on brainstorming for a investment company, my colleague gave a input that our target audience are wealthy people whom look for ways in tax benefits, tax avoidance, etc to save more money. When we know this we clearly know that what is they keyword need to be on content planning, SEM keywords and other display advertising. 

In simple, take a paper or go to a board and sit with people and Draw out your target profile. Once you have this, everything is straight forward next time when planning your ads or writing communication problem .

Assume you have the persona ready, let’s see how we can use this in different marketing channels

Targeting in Content Marketing

Assuming you already know about it, Am not going deep into explaining what is content marketing. Am a strong believer in content marketing which is sustainable for any business even though it’s a slow(comparing to push based) and steady process in long term.

As we know who are user base and also the similar players in different countries, we did two things. 

1. Keyword Analysis to find what people are searching for 
2. Similar players on what they have wrote before and how those contents are trending. 

As we are a mobile app business and the industry insights for mobile app download is highly come from App Store usages. Which means if we can identify what people are searching to install existing players, we just need to redo it for the current target market.

Related: Here is the tools i used to do competitor analysis for mobile apps.

Now we know what content people are searching, we can start writing about it. But also we can also check how other players have done their content production as well. Using this data we have drafted out what type of content we should be publishing in our blog and sharing on social media as well.

Targeting in Facebook Advertising

Assuming you already familiar with facebook advertising, if not read here: Detailed guide on Facebook Advertising

Using the persona analysis, you could use the different targeting layers like the below 

Why did we use OLX here? We already know students who already know and had a exposure to other classifieds business would be potential users for the social marketplace. However there are multiple targeting options you could use here based on your business. 

For detailed approach on how effective you can use targeting in facebook, check out this section

Targeting in Google Search (Paid and Organic)

Once you know what keywords they are searching for it, your job become easier whether you going for organic search marketing or Paid search marketing. 

The content plan what you have seen above would already help us on organic search. We just need to make sure there is proper focus keyword for each article and the on page optimisation for SEO is done. 

For Paid search, this is what we have done. 

Segmentation and it’s benefits

Segmentation and it’s benefits would be continued soon 🙂