Marketers aren’t unfamiliar with the concept of segmentation. We use segmentation to send personalized mailings, establish buyer-specific pricing models, and better understand our most devoted clients’ habits. It’s also a useful tool for producing additional social media leads. While publishing more frequently and releasing a variety of content kinds is beneficial for increasing interaction with your audience, segmentation can provide extra benefits.
This post will teach you how to apply segmentation ideas to social media, as well as the benefits it may offer to your business and tips for segmenting your social media audience effectively.
What is Social Media Segmentation?
The process of breaking down and categorizing your target audiences based on shared features such as demographic information, behavioral habits, and geographic location is known as social media segmentation. This makes it easier to produce adverts that are more tailored to a given audience’s preferences. Let’s take a look at seven ways to segment your social media consumers.
A. Know your audience
Understanding your target audience is essential for precise, relevant social media segmentation, just as it is for any marketing approach. It will be difficult to design alternative tactics to help you succeed in your process until you know who your clients are, what they want, and how they like to be sold to.
You can construct buyer personas using your analytics and research data to better understand your audience. Buyer personas are fictionalized portrayals of your ideal consumers that may help you focus your efforts on qualifying leads, attracting high-value customers, and producing content that appeals to their interests and aspirations.
Consider it this way: if your data shows that Facebook generates the greatest engagement, delve deeper into who your audience is on that platform and construct a buyer persona that provides a more complete picture of who they are. Many social media networks include audience targeting features that you may utilize to promote especially to your different segmented audiences, and these representations you’ve built immediately relate to our next advice.
B. Social Media Targeting Tool
The majority of consumers associate social media segmentation with paid targeted choices. However, there are organic targeting tools on numerous platforms that you can utilize to communicate to your diverse audiences for both low and big-budget marketers. Businesses can tailor their messaging to users based on demographics, interests, and geographic location, for example, on Facebook. There are also built-in targeting features on LinkedIn that allow you to filter and segment by industry, company size, and a variety of other factors (shown below).
C. Create Audience Group + List
We create lists every time we conduct a new email campaign, so most marketers are familiar with the concept. But did you know that you can utilize lists to make your social media chats more productive? Users can create lists of friends, followers, people who have attended an event, and more on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Your Twitter lists can categorize your followers into certain groups, such as where they are in the buyer’s journey. You’ll be able to watch all of these people in your lists within one channel whenever they tweet, giving you an indication of what they tweet about and what they enjoy. With this information, you can build better-targeted advertising that speaks to the preferences of your segmented audience.
You can use open groups to learn more about how a larger audience perceives your business. You can use this area to engage in open-ended conversations and ask questions like “What are your biggest challenges?” or “What constitutes excellent customer service?” You can also use your audience to test new ideas or come up with new content ideas that they would find fascinating and relevant. The benefit is that you’ll have a huge group of people to bounce ideas off of. What’s the drawback? They might not be as well-versed in your sector as you require.
D. Experiment with Time
As marketers, we understand the importance of timing in marketing, particularly on social media. If you’ve built realistic, relevant buyer personas, you’ll see that your followers are spread out across several geographic regions. This means that your followers in the Midwest are retiring to bed, while your followers in Australia are getting ready to rise. Differentiating your posting hours allows you to engage a greater section of your audience by allowing followers from all around the world to interact with your content.
Another advantage of doing so is that you’ll have many posts available for your target audience to read. Consider this: if you post three times a day for three different audience segments, each of those segments will be able to see the posts meant for the other. They’ll have three more chances to interact with your material, and three more chances to convert.
E. Multiple Networks? Check
More people will want to interact with you on social media as you grasp the different techniques to segment your specialized consumers. If you don’t already have several social media accounts, you might be surprised to learn that one of the greatest methods to offer relevant material to specific audiences is to create multiple social media profiles, each with its own purpose.
If you’re a clothes company, for example, your target market is likely to be diverse in terms of age. While you may want to reach them all on one platform, your younger viewers (ages 10 to 19) are more likely to be on TikTok and your older audiences on Instagram.
Remember that each social media account should still serve a broader audience, so focus on growing your entire audience from one account before expanding to others. If you decide to create more accounts, make sure that users can immediately distinguish their function (for example, customer service, marketing materials, your annual event, etc.) — otherwise, you’ll be adding to your workload.
F. Streamline Processes
There are several social media tools that can help you build and publish adverts tailored to your segmented audiences if you wish to use multiple platforms or just want to expedite your procedures.
One of these tools is Falcon.io. It includes an all-in-one social platform for developing paid and organic ads, monitoring customer engagement data across all of your accounts, and even segmenting custom and lookalike audiences, as shown in the image below.
G. Test Out Strategies
Despite the fact that this suggestion has nothing to do with segmenting your audience, the effectiveness of your segmentation is determined by how successfully you’ve constructed your groups. Using social media testing to see how your content performs among your target audiences is a good approach to see if you’ve segmented your audience correctly and can help you improve your strategy.
Let’s imagine you’ve discovered that your millennial demographic is most active on Instagram. Now that you know they’re there, you can start making material for them. But what if you want to learn more about their preferences? Perhaps you’re curious as to whether they favor Instagram Stories or Instagram Reels. Using both of these content kinds in an A/B test can help you better understand how to communicate with these segmented audiences.
Conclusion
The biggest plus with market research is staying on top of trends and of course – the market! If your vision is to beat your competition, market research should be at the top of your list and Maction can help you with that. Book a call with us today to explore what a market research partner can do for you.
