The importance of data analysis for planning: Segmentation and targeting
When it comes to planning and creating smart, results-focused campaigns, savvy marketers understand that data is of paramount importance.
Data can – and should – have a huge impact on your marketing budget and strategy. In a series of four blogs, we’ll examine ways that data-driven decision making can boost your marketing planning.
This week, we’re looking at segmentation and targeting.
Boost engagement and efficiency
Trying to talk to everybody with the same piece of content or ad is going to make it difficult to reach anybody. Tailoring your campaigns to resonate with specific audiences at the right time is how you’re going to increase engagement, conversions, and improve your budget efficiency.
Audiences can be defined any way that works for you. Gender, device, geographic location, age, interests, language, are just a few of the more common examples.
Tapping into your own data gives you more granular detail about customers and prospects, so you can truly understand what your audience wants. It also allows you to predict visitor behaviour with a greater degree of accuracy. With visitor behaviour patterns mapped out, you can optimise your marketing funnel, moving your prospects through the optimal conversion path.
“Our enquiries have increased by around 75% year on year,” says Matthew Jackson, Digital Marketing Manager at Stowe Family Law. He added that they are now able to optimise their spend by targeting the segments that produce the most valuable enquiries, in the most cost-effective way.
Using segmentation and targeting to drive positive ROI
To transform your campaign activity and create hyper-relevant campaigns, it’s important to get to grips with what data you should be using. Some examples are:
Existing customers, warm leads, unknown prospects
Segment your existing customers from your warm leads and cold prospects. You can break these segments down even further based on the types of products they’re interested – or likely to be interested – in.
Your messages will be different for each audience, and you’ll target them differently based on the relationships you’ve built. For existing customers, a keep-in-touch call is a great way to build loyalty and drive upsell for a specific product, while paid search or an email campaign is more likely to be more effective for new lead generation.
Caller insight
You can uncover patterns from inbound conversations and use this insight to target prospects. Using speech analytics, you can identify:
- Callers with a high intent to purchase – and which campaigns they originate from
- What type of enquiries you receive over the phone (sales, support, accounts, product enquiries, etc), and
- Opportunities to improve the visitor journey and increase sales.
Insights from speech analytics can be used to improve your retargeting campaigns. By creating remarketing audiences based on specific conversations, you can create and serve more relevant ads to continue to nurture those warm leads.
Visitor behaviour
Understanding what content visitors consume is crucial to how you market your goods and services. When you know what interests them, you can create segments based on those interests and market specific, or related, products and services to them.
We consume content on a phone and a desktop in very different ways. After segmenting your audience into the relevant groups, you need to make sure you’re targeting them in the way that’s going to catch their attention. This behaviour is also evident in your data – for instance, desktop or mobile, email engagement, links on social media, or via an app.
Reach the right audience
Consumers are more empowered, and have more choice, than ever before. Segmentation and targeting are crucial for you to understand how to capture the right prospects at the right time, and in the right place, with the right proposition. Your customers are full of information that will help to inform and refine your strategy. Careful use and analysis of your data will give you everything you need to understand the way your audience thinks and behaves to segment and target them effectively.
Next week: Part two of our series will explain how data informs your earned, owned, shared, and paid media strategy.