You may have decided to jumpstart your content marketing with a blog that’s highly relevant to your business because you read online that businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than other companies. However, regardless of this thinkpiece being the most helpful content you have ever published, it’s drowning in a sea of content noise.
At the core of every effective content marketing strategy is getting the right content across to the right buyer. You might have a general understanding of who your customers are, but not a full understanding of what distinguishes them from one another, and that is why it’s vital that you research your audience before you start creating high-quality, relevant content. When you understand your customers and what is important to them, the content you create will increase conversion rates.
Organizing your customers into distinct segments allows you to target your content more efficiently and successfully. You will not waste time or effort on generalized content, and you will be able to promote that content to ensure it reaches as many viewers as possible from your target group.
Read on to find out how you can segment your target audience to maximise your content reach, optimising your content marketing ROI.
What Is Customer Segmentation?
In order to attract leads that convert, you must target a small group of clients who are most similar to your best current customers, rather than a vast universe of possible customers. Customer segmentation is the separation of potential customers into different categories in a given market based on shared traits. This provides you with an easy way to organise and manage your company’s relationships with its customers while tailoring and personalising your marketing, service, and sales efforts to the needs of specific groups. As a result, this improves customer loyalty, reach and conversion rates.
Types Of Customer Segmentation
Content reach is a crucial facet of a company’s online presence and represents chances for businesses to communicate with their customers. These popular models and types of segmentation will help you to divide your clients into groups based on common characteristics.
- Demographic Segmentation
Demographic segmentation divides a targeted audience according to variables like age, gender, income, education level, family size, ethnicity, and others. Since most products cater to specific individual requirements related to at least one demographic element, this is the most widely used form of segmentation used in content marketing.
- Geographic Segmentation
This type of segmentation divides target users into groups based on predefined geographic boundaries. A market can be defined by its location, such as a town, county, or country. You can also categorise them based on their climate or population density. It is simple but effective because knowing where your customers live allows you to better comprehend their needs and target them with location-based ads.
- Technographic Segmentation
Customers are classified based on their ownership, usage, and attitudes toward information and communication technologies. These technologies are a defining force and a central focus in a wide range of occupations and lifestyles. This data also assists content marketers in determining the most effective channels for reaching out to their customers.
- Behavioural Segmentation
Behavioural segmentation focuses on the customers’ specific reactions and how they proceed with their purchasing processes. It captures challenges such as their attitudes toward a brand, how they interact with it, and how knowledgeable they are about industry issues. This information is essential because it relates to how customers interact with your content. When you know their behaviour, you can market your products and services more effectively.
- Needs-Based Segmentation
This model uses consumers’ validated reasons for purchasing a specific product to segment the market. Market research is used to identify and validate customer needs and marketers can use this information to generate leads through their content.
- Psychological Segmentation
This segmentation is concerned with the intrinsic characteristics of your target market. Customers are classified according to their values, interests, personality traits, attitude, and ways of life. At this level, use focus groups, surveys, interviews, and audience testing to better understand your audience.
- Value-Based Segmentation
This model classifies consumers according to their monetary worth. Consumers who have similar values in the same segment think alike, making it simple to target and market to them.
Creating Targeted Content
To be successful, any piece of content must be tailored and speak to a specific person (a potential customer) with a specific need at a certain moment in their buyer journey. In other words, you must have tailored content that shows a thorough awareness of who your audience is and where they are on the route to purchase.
You might consider starting with your content, such as conducting a content audit of what you already have and everything your competitors have. This is crucial, but it comes later.
You should actually begin with these two critical steps:
- Learn about your target audience.
- Recognize your own limitations as a marketer.
These two stages must be completed prior to conducting any audit of your own or rival content.
Know your audience
Many brands believe they know who their target audience is. However, they frequently get stuck thinking about who they want their audience to be. Customers aren’t looking for a definition of something 9 times out of 10. They want a solid comprehension of a topic or a solution to a problem. Your content should not only target a certain audience, but also a specific problem that they need to solve.
Although collecting demographic information is part of knowing your audience, learning their pain points and their thoughts is far more beneficial to a marketer looking to earn and keep customers.
What are your marketing growth constraints?
You will be able to plan content at different stages of the product funnel, but first, you must consider what growth constraints your company has and where they sit in the funnel. Since raising awareness is a common growth constraint for firms, it’s common to focus on creating content for that top-of-funnel awareness stage. But what if your awareness is high, but your conversions at the bottom of the funnel aren’t as high as you’d like? Locate the cause of the constraint, find the gaps, and target your content there.
Consider creating material that does two things: it keeps the searcher’s objective in mind while also providing insight into unresolved subjects and questions. This will provide your content marketing with a competitive advantage. You don’t just know what your competitors know; you also know what they don’t know.
You should be generating content that resonates with your prospective investor at every stage of the buying process, from awareness to consideration to sale. So creating sales-funnel-specific content is another critical step in ensuring your content is well targeted, not just to a specific category of the buyer but also to buyers at different stages of evaluating your product.
Where Do You Start Creating Targeted Content?
Whether you are debating between topical and evergreen content, there are four different types of content you can create for buyers no matter what product or service you sell.
- Provide high-interest content with a lighter tone and basic information to potential customers.
- Introduce your company to new customers and provide them with useful information and tips.
- Focus on convincing and converting experts on your type of product or service with meticulously researched information and plenty of detailed information.
- Use self-promotional content to make insiders feel like they’re a part of a group. Give them the inside scoop on every new product or option.
How Do B2B Segmentation And Content Marketing Work?
If you’re dealing with businesses rather than individuals, your approach to segmentation will have to be a little different. You can create market segments based on similar geographic variables, or you can differentiate based on company size, industry, organizational policies, purchasing habits, or urgency. Keep your content for them concise and clear at all times. Focus on the concrete benefits for that specific group of businesses when personalising the content for each segment.
How Can You Gauge Your Content Marketing Reach?
One word – analytics!
You can monitor the success of your content using Google Analytics and other platforms. You can quantify things like:
- Search rankings
- Click-through rate
- Website traffic
- Domain authority
- Links
- Subscriber growth
All of this information will assist you in making solid, data-driven decisions for future content. Properly utilizing customer segmentation models in your content marketing can influence every aspect of your organization—sales, marketing, product development, customer service, and others. Your company’s customer focus and market clarity will improve, allowing it to scale in a far more predictable and effective manner.
Regardless of whether you decide to use a content marketing agency, or take matters into your own hands, make sure you create content to attract, engage, and sell, allowing your brand’s expertise and unique value to come through. With some forethought and systematic content marketing, you too can reach the right people and build brand loyalty.
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