What is Audience Segmentation in Advertising

Audience segmentation Audience segmentation aims to offer more individualized messages and build better connections by identifying subgroups within the target population.

Demographic factors like region, gender identity, age, ethnicity, wealth, or degree of formal education can be used to create subgroups. Additionally, subgroups may be created based on past purchases or other activities. When you know your audience's personality types, values, attitudes, and beliefs, you may use psychographics. One way to categorize people would be to divide them into groups according to their family affiliation, individualism or traditionalism, leadership or subservience, adventure, or domesticity.

To save time, a lot of inexperienced advertisers develop an ad campaign and spread it widely. But audience segmentation employs a more sophisticated tactic; it lets you divide contacts into more manageable groups so you can cater to their actual needs.

The importance of audience segmentation

By increasing the personalization of your advertising campaign, audience segmentation helps you avoid mediocrity. It has the importance of:

• Identify the audiences you want to reach.

• Make your ad campaign specifically targeted at them.

• Address a particular requirement that will enable you to boost conversion rates.

• Build a connection with your consumers to gain their trust.

• Encourage prospective customers to accelerate sales.

Customers are more inclined to listen to your ad when your message is tailored specifically for them. 

But where should we begin? Developing a fictional character or customer profile that represents the ideal customer is the first step in most marketing and advertising strategies. The person's age, work location, marital status, and hobbies may all be included in their profile.

Through profiles, you can interact with your clients on their level, particularly when it comes to understanding their issues and how you can assist in resolving them. You can group those profiles after you've created them.

Audience segmentation types

Advertisers frequently categorize individuals according to their behavior, demographics, and stage of the buyer's journey. The product or service you are offering will determine the audience segmentation method you employ.

For example, you might not want to classify users from different geographic areas differently if your website sells ski equipment as most of them most likely have to go to ski. However, grouping people according to their interactions and conduct can be useful. Individuals who have followed sports for a long time and are familiar with the goods you provide are likely to engage with your business differently than those who are just getting started despite the location.

Let's examine the approaches you may use to divide up your audience.

Demography

This approach of audience segmentation is the most popular and typically the simplest. You can utilize demographic factors such as age, income level, job type, and geography to categorize your audience. This approach is well-liked because it is effective.

Selecting customers based on when they are most likely to require your goods is one kind of location-based segmentation technique. For instance, equipment purchases made by an agricultural enterprise are more likely to occur during harvest. 

Behavior

This tactic goes a bit further than just dividing people by demographics. Seeing what people buy, how frequently they buy it, and why they buy it are all part of the process of analyzing behavior.

For example, a customer who regularly makes little purchases needs different signals than someone who makes major purchases only occasionally. This is due to the fact that those individuals have distinct needs and most likely purchase for various motives.

With behavioral targeting, your ad campaign is delivered to clients at the exact moment when they are most likely to convert. Potential customers, recent customers, loyal customers, and dropouts who have moved to a different brand are a few examples of these groups.

Interest

Everybody has distinct interests. You can better target the right people with the correct message by segmenting your audience based on these interests and creating distinct consumer groups.

For instance, you may leverage the information that a large number of your clients have about a certain sport or sports team to make interesting, tailored advertisements for that demographic.

You can also divide up your audience into groups according to the aesthetics they like—whether it's a simple, contemporary design or something more conventional and antiquated. This is very important to determine the design concept of your ad campaign.

Customer journey

By employing this tactic, you can customize your communications according to the customer journey stage. The customer journey phase consists of awareness, consideration, and decision.

A customer who is just starting out may have recently realized they have an issue to resolve. On the other hand, someone who is almost done understands what to buy and is prepared to make a decision. By using segmentation, you can address the individual needs of each buyer and address any queries they might have rather than just providing them with the same message.

Level of interaction

Different marketing is needed for contacts that engage with your brand on a regular basis compared to those who do so less frequently. A person who often purchases from you or subscribes to your newsletter indicates that they are interested in your business, so they are probably more open to receiving your message than someone who only sometimes interacts with it. Of course, you don’t want to bombard all of your customers with the same message that might result in losing them.

This doesn't mean that you should minimize or ignore users who are not very engaged. You may launch campaigns with customized messaging for these users. 

Utilizing devices

Users will not all visit the internet in the same manner. 50% of your visitors will likely be coming from mobile devices to access your website.

Your ad campaign should adjust to both desktop and mobile device usage patterns. Certain adjustments are obvious, like reshaping your ad campaign’s mobile version to fit smaller screens. However, consider the context in which it will be viewed as mobile customers are more likely to have limited time to read lengthy postings. So, Keep lengthy content exclusive to your desktop audience and keep it short for mobile users.

Implications of the New IAB Definition for Video Ad on Audience Segmentation

Recently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has introduced a new definition for video ad, which has significant implications for audience segmentation in advertising strategies. This definitions is crucial for advertisers seeking to tailor their messages effectively to different audience segments. By understanding how audiences consume video content across various platforms, advertisers can optimize their targeting strategies to deliver more relevant and engaging ads based on the new IAB video ad definition.