When conducting marketing activities, it pays to have a strategy that appeals to your target audience.  You may have success creating a uniform marketing message and distributing it as widely as possible; of course, you may be able to more efficiently utilize your marketing dollars by identifying specific segments of your target audience and creating messages tailored to those groups.  So how do you identify those groups and determine how to market to them most effectively?  Marketing personas and audience segmentation are two strategies you can use to define your audience and their interests.  Here’s how the marketing experts at TIC Digital Marketing utilize these strategies, often in conjunction with one another, to create the best outcomes for our clients:

Marketing Personas

You can choose to define different portions of your audience using an archetype, like a character in a movie.  A marketing persona is one of these archetypal characters, which represents a group of potential customers as a single person.  When you market to that character, your content is likely to appeal to the entire group that it represents.  Characteristics can include behavior patterns, goals, needs, and more.  Your marketing persona might be identified using terms like “Young Professional,” or “Stay-at-Home Mom.” You can even give the persona a name if you would like!

 Audience Segmentation

Though it may seem similar to a marketing persona, and audience segment is a more abstract representation of a specific group of users.  Generally, audience segments are identified by demographic information, rather than by a character archetype.  A segment might be identified by characteristics like age range, income level, education level, location, or other attributes.  Instead of creating a character for this subgroup, you can identify it more generally in terms of common interests and needs.

 Putting the Two Together

While adopting either of these strategies can help you create more effective marketing materials, it’s best to use both in conjunction.  Identify an audience segment, then think about the specific type of person who would most accurately represent that group.  Who is that person?  What do they need?  What do they want?  While your marketing persona doesn’t always have to overlap perfectly with your audience segment, it’s best if they overlap a lot.  Once you have identified your audience segment and given them a persona, it will be easier to conceptualize what types of products and services that person would be interested in using.  You can use demographic data and research to inform the creation of your marketing personas, and the personalized marketing content you create for those personas will make your real customers feel like you’re speaking directly to them.

While these marketing strategies have existed for a long time, they’ve taken on a life of their own in the digital age.  Social media, email marketing, video sharing, and websites all present an enormous opportunity to gear marketing content to a small slice of the general public and cater to their unique interests.  What once was a way to get a leg up on the competition is now an absolute necessity, and if you aren’t utilizing marketing personas and audience segmentation, you’re likely to fall behind the pack.

We understand that this information may be a bit confusing.  If you need help identifying your audience segments and marketing personas, TIC Digital Marketing can help!  We’ve already put in the time crunching the numbers on demographic data to identify audience segments and we can help you adapt those models to your industry and your company’s voice.  Give us a call or fill out the online form on our contact page to speak to a digital marketing expert about your goals, or to inquire about other services like inbound digital marketing and WordPress development and branding.