Divide-and-Conquer Marketing: Behavioral Segmentation in 4 Steps

a great rock divide with a tiny person falling
Table of Contents

    Not all customers are created equal. Behavioral segmentation is the marketing process that takes this into account, allowing your business to hone its advertising efforts and target discrete categories of consumer based on how the act. This is an important step toward the success of virtually any business, and the modern accessibility of data makes it easier than ever before. Here are the 4 steps your business can take as it begins its behavioral segmentation journey.

    #1 What Are Your Customer Segmentation Goals?

    Why are you building a customer segmentation strategy? Ask this of yourself and get a handle on why you’re segmenting. What do you want to get from the process? If you can figure out which outcomes you’d like to achieve, you can then build the rest of your strategy around that. When you develop your customer segmentation objectives, remember that they’ll be unique to your business – it’s not a uniform thing.So for instance, the quantity of your concrete goals will depend on the size of your business, its type, and the industry where you fit—not to mention who your customers are! Keep in mind also that your goals may be relevant to multiple teams within your business or just a single department.

    #2 Divide Customers into Groups

    Got an idea of exactly what you want from the customer segmentation process? Good. Next is where you decide just how you’ll segment those customers. There’s neither a right nor a wrong way to go about this. It depends entirely on the nature of your business in particular, your customers, and the goals you set during the first step (see #1 above).

    For instance, should you want to share targeted ads with certain members of your audience who have certain dietary habits,those customers can be segmented by food purchased or by the quantities in which it is consumed within a given timeframe.

    #3 Home in on and Reach Customer Segments

    With customers segmented, you now have to figure out a way to target them across your business. By making sure all relevant departments are on board with how those customers are segmented, those department members will have the ability to effectively target your customers through the avenue of their standard work. You want to market in such a way that your content is tailored and customized with an eye toward attracting, teaching, and meeting the needs of your selected audience members. This in turn boosts leads and brand awareness.

    Your sales team can identify certain common traits that your audience shares in order to develop reliable, effective ways of reaching out to communicating with them, ultimately increasing conversions. Likewise, your service team can use customer segments to prep resources and materials for the segment based on whatever challenges that segment of customers is most likely to undergo.

    #4 Analyze the Segments and Adjust

    Analyzing your progress in segmenting customers thus far can provide some insight, and you can update/change your process if you need to—you probably will need to unless your segmentation efforts were spectacular and perfect on the first try. Talk to marketing, sales, and service in order to pry loose some of their opinions on potential new adjustments. You can also experiment with new ways of grouping your customers together to decide what makes the most sense. It’s also extremely helpful to pick up some feedback from your customers as you work toward more effectively segmenting them into effective groups. 

    You can do this by conducting surveys where you ask customers about their feature/product habits of use. This process helps you accurately organize those customers on the basis of their specific behaviors. Finally, review how your customers get segmented when you update your product/service or revise your buyer personas — these changes require that you reorganize some of your existing customer segments.

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    Raek Content Team

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