COM-20110-XE025 Audience Segmentation
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Audience Segmentation
While marketing, trying to target or talk to everybody is very difficult. Generic and vague messages are less likely to resonate with the audience that specific direct communication (Dietrich, Rundle-Thiele, & Kubacki, 2017). This is the reason why targeted marketing is important in every business. When it comes to target marketing, audience segmentation is crucial as it allows you to break down your target market based on certain criteria to deliver the ads to the right people in the right place.
Audience Targeting
Traditionally, demographic-based approaches used to be the determining factor of who the customer is; whether the person is male or female, their age along with their identity and address (Weinmeister, 2018). Currently, users now engage on digital platforms using their laptops, tablets, smartphones, and wearable fitness brand among others in different apps, browsers, and email. Knowing only the person’s age and gender does not provide enough information about how they spend the entire day, consumer behaviors, personal interest, as well as their needs and wants. Consumer data is more advanced than ever before. Understanding the people well will help you deliver strongest comping to the right audience (Sri, 2020). Launching a mobile application means that the company has become part of global market. Therefore, finding the right target market is an overall business strategy. This is because the business will not move forward without understanding who the business will offer the products and who will actually buy it. Therefore, it is important to first consider the category of the health fitness application.
The type of online audience to target includes pregnant women, children, and different age groups of people and gender. This app will heap the audience to monitor their health and fitness by analyzing their calories intake while giving guidance on proper nutrition to help them stay health and fit. Therefore, the best place for the company to advertise its products is on social media. this is because social media represents the world of all possibilities (Appel et al., 2020). First, the company should use its accounts to understand the customer needs and wants and to ultimately understand them. Also the company should ensure that there are is social tools that could enable the consumers share their achievements with their friend.
The company might have pretty good sense of who will buy the product, but is important to consider if the product appeals to them. The most important data that can help the company find out about the target audience needs are personal data such as age and gender, engagement data such as social media pages, emails (Luo et al., 2019). Behavioral data such as purchasing habits and product usage information and health status among others are as well important data. This will basically help the company predict what their needs and wants are. For example, based on age, young men have a starving need to look great and build muscles along with keeping fit. On the other hand, people with diabetes need health guidelines and therefore the app could help them out. On the other hand, data on purchasing habit and product usage information will help the company observe the behavioral patterns thus helping the company to understand how people use products. The company database will help the company collect the data that can help the company identify the niche group that might be interested in the product.
Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is rapidly advancing more because of digital marketing. Segmentation of the audience will help the company to only focus on those audience members that are the most critical to reach by designing the most effective as well as efficient strategy that could help each audience adapt to the new behavior (Engl, Smittenaar, & Sgaier, 2019). The segmentation will enable the marketing program to match the audience based on their specific needs and preferences. Audience segmentation will take place during the processes of audience analysis. In order to gain the stakeholder’s output, segmentation can as well be part of the stakeholders’ workshop. The process of segmentation will involve definition of the segments as per the audience’s needs and preferences, health, and behaviors as well as how they are affected by the problem at hand, demographic size, age and gender. This will be followed by reviewing of the information collected from the primary audience which will help in providing an insight whether and how best to segment the audience. Based on the identified audience and their characteristics, it will be necessary to determine whether segmentation is necessary. Finally, it will be important to group the primary audience according to traits that makes each group different from the other. This differences are based on behaviors, geographic, social-demographic, and psychographic traits (Engl, Smittenaar, & Sgaier, 2019).
Basically, the target audience is most likely to have an interest on the company products and brand. Therefore, it is important to reach out to them in the most effective way. After audience segmentation the next step is to use the information about the characteristic of each segmentation and adapt a speech to their interests, level of understanding, attitude, and beliefs (Swani et al., 2017). This will help the communication strategy to be audience-centered. Audience-centered approach is important more because the effective of communication will be improved if the message is created and delivered in the most appropriate manner. The content of the message should speak to the audience’s interest bearing in mind that the audience wants an answer to their need and problems (Swani et al., 2017). Providing these answers will allow them to look and trust the company brand for more answers thus building their trust and loyalty. The data collected and segmentations will help the company to use some key words and create more specific content that different segments of the audience are more likely to engage. Demographic factor organizes the audience according to their identities, experience as well as need, and wants. This will enable the creation of content attend their needs.
Messaging Strategy
To effectively communicate to the target audience, the company should utilize social media. inbound marketing through creation of content to communicate to specific audience relies on hits from search engines. However, the company can boost the chances of the content going viral by sharing the content in its social media accounts. Although social media platforms are not the core of inbound marketing strategy, any search and reference is a bonus. However, it is important to be careful not to invest more on boosting posts on social media unless the company has a specific strategy in place. Social media such as Facebook is sometimes likely to hare the content with a wide range of fake profiles as if they are real ones. Moreover, online platforms and the company websites information will be utilized to get an insight of the content the audience is searching for through the use of key words they searched for or the reason they give from the access content (Rustad, 2016). This will enable us to segment email lists to be more specific in our communication. Rather than sharing a broad-based content that may not speak to the audience’s interests, the strategy will allow the messages to much more specific and attend to the audience that will be more likely to engage with it. Once we have partitioned the email marketing lists based on interest, we can automate specific message content to be sent to each list on regular basis. This will be effective messaging strategy as it will be easier to choose contents that engage each group interest.
Ultimately, there will be different metrics that can help the company to track impacts of the content marketing on brand awareness. This metrics include social media reach, shared count, and brand mentions (Raatikainen, 2018). The social reach of the message content is an indicator of the impact that the content created is having on the brand. This shows that the content is the right type of content. Shared count on the other hand is the most effective metric as it indicates the number of times the content has been shared in different social platforms. Brand mention in the online platforms is also another great way to measure how awareness of the brand is changing. Moreover, the number of online searches indicates how the general awareness of the company brand is changing (Raatikainen, 2018). The impression data shows the number of customers that are searching for a variation of the company brand name. therefore, brand mention online, number of online searches, shared count, as well as the social media reach will be the key metrics to strengthen future communication and messaging strategies.
References
Appel, G., Grewal, L., Hadi, R., & Stephen, A. T. (2020). The future of social media in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(1), 79-95.
Dietrich, T., Rundle-Thiele, S., & Kubacki, K. (2017). Segmentation in social marketing (Vol. 1). Berlin, Germany: springer.
Engl, E., Smittenaar, P., & Sgaier, S. K. (2019). Identifying population segments for effective intervention design and targeting using unsupervised machine learning: an end-to-end guide. Gates open research, 3.
Luo, J., Pan, X., Wang, S., & Huang, Y. (2019). Identifying target audience on enterprise social network. Industrial Management & Data Systems.
Raatikainen, L. (2018). Measuring Inbound Marketing.
Rustad, N. (2016). Process Makes Perfect: Asking Your Target Audience What They Really Want to Know About You. Public Services Quarterly, 12(1), 65-70.
Sri, V. K. (2020). Behavioural Intention and Customer Satisfication of Health and Fitness Apps. Journal of Talent Development and Excellence, 12(1), 4834-4846.
Swani, K., Milne, G. R., Brown, B. P., Assaf, A. G., & Donthu, N. (2017). What messages to post? Evaluating the popularity of social media communications in business versus consumer markets. Industrial Marketing Management, 62, 77-87.
Weinmeister, P. (2018). Audience Targeting and Personalization. In Practical Guide to Salesforce Communities (pp. 259-288). Apress, Berkeley, CA.