Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation helps you bring order to the needs of your diverse social media followers. So you can better understand who they are, what they feel, and how they behave online.
With these insights, you can create tailored content for your audience, deliver the best customer experience, and optimize your marketing efforts.
While this is important, many entrepreneurs still need to catch up on important data about their target audience due to social media analytics and audience segmentation mistakes.
This article will show you a few things to avoid when segmenting your audience.
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1. Making Assumptions
Assumptions about your target audience’s behavior and online interests without corresponding data are like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
You need data-driven insights into how your audience expresses themselves: their lifestyle, values, beliefs, and opinions. That way, you can segment your audience to truly reflect what they think, feel, and do.
For example, if you segment your audience based on assumptions without solid data or a description of their behavior, it might look like this;
A woman aged 18-35 in the U.S. follows skincare brands Nivea and Dove on social media.
However, with more accurate insights, your audience segmentation strategy may look like this;
A woman aged 18-35 in the U.S. who is interested in developing an effective skincare routine, follows Nivea and Dove brands online, uses the hashtag #skincareroutine, shares content about skincare, or generally shares her intent/love for a skincare routine.
In general, assumptions can significantly impact audience segmentation on social media. If assumptions about the target audience are incorrect, the resulting segmentation may not accurately represent the target audience and may lead to ineffective marketing efforts.
Did You Know?
90% of companies say that data is increasingly important to their business.
2. Posting At The Same Time
If you post at the same time, you limit the reach of your segmentation research, and often much of your audience doesn’t see your content.
That’s because with a broad audience, you’re likely to have customers from all over the world and in different time zones. That means your followers in some parts of the United States may be going to bed while others in the UK are just waking up.
To avoid this, you should post at different times. This will help you understand the needs and wants of your customers in different time zones, get more engagement from your audience, and segment your audience better.
Another benefit is that you’re constantly engaging with your customers. This way, you’re constantly leaving an impression on them.
Did You Know?
Most marketers surveyed by Hubspot say they post on most social media platforms four to six times a week.
3. Using An Outdated Buyer Persona
Before segmenting your target audience, you need to know them first. This is exactly what a buyer persona helps you with.
A buyer persona is a fictional character representing a company’s target customer and is used to guide marketing efforts and make them more effective. Suppose a company is using an outdated buyer persona. In this case, it’s likely that marketing efforts need to be better aligned with the needs, wants, and behaviors of the target audience. This can lead to ineffective marketing and a poor return on investment.
For example, let’s say you run a logistics company that specializes in grocery delivery. When you first launched your business, your buyer persona was a housewife between the ages of 25 and 45 who does all the shopping for her family and is especially concerned with finding the lowest prices.
If your business has grown and your customer persona has changed to include many younger working parents or people who rely on online grocery delivery or people of all ages who enjoy the convenience and are willing to pay a premium for fast delivery, then that buyer persona would no longer apply.
In this case, you need to update your buyer persona to accurately reflect your customer’s current status and behavior.
Therefore, it’s important to regularly review and update buyer personas to ensure they accurately reflect the current needs, wants, and behaviors of your target audience. This will help you find the right target audience for your marketing efforts.
Did You Know?
Persona-based content increases customer engagement by 6x when targeting cold leads.
4. Focusing On Quantity Over Quality
Content is key if you want to build an audience online. This means that the type of content you share will help you understand your audience’s behavior and segment them into different categories.
Instead of trying to reach a large, diverse audience with a broad message, you can focus on the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
That is, instead of posting 10x a day and flooding your audience with relevant and irrelevant content, take a break. Focus on only sharing content that is relevant to your audience.
When you focus on the quality of the content you share, you can create more targeted and effective campaigns. You can also create messages that resonate more with specific groups of people, which leads to better engagement and conversion rates.
Did You Know?
83% of marketers believe it’s more effective to create high-quality content less frequently.
5. Posting The Same Type Of Content Across All Social Media Platforms
Each social media channel differs from the others in terms of content type, features, and functionality.
Each platform is set up differently, so users know what type of content to expect. Instagram, for example, is best for posting images, while Twitter is ideal for posting more text than images.
When segmenting your social media audience, consider each platform as its own channel to learn more about your customers’ online behavior.
Each social media platform has its own user base, so content that resonates well with one audience may not necessarily resonate with another. Since each platform has its own features, content that works well on one platform may not work as well on another.
Also, different social media platforms require different approaches to formatting, hashtags, and other tactics. You can increase your content’s effectiveness and reach by tailoring your content to each platform.
Did You Know?
Marketers today create content for multiple audience segments — marketing to three audience segments is most common.
6. Not Using Social Media Targeting Tools
It’s easy to get lost trying to find the ideal tool to segment your audience, but the truth is you don’t need any special tools.
Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook have built-in targeting tools that let you filter your audience and target the right people. On LinkedIn, you can filter your audience by company size, industry, etc. Facebook, on the other hand, lets you filter your audience by demographic, geographic, and other factors.
Using these tools, you can identify and target specific groups of people within your social media audience more efficiently than doing it manually. You can also better tailor your content to the specific interests and needs of different groups within your audience.
This way, you’ll likely see better results in terms of engagement, conversion, and other metrics important to your business.
Did You Know?
Social listening is the number one tactic used by marketers.
7. Not Boosting Your Posts
Boosting your posts will help you reach a wider audience that needs your product/service. This can be especially useful if you’re targeting a specific audience or offering a new product or service.
It can also increase engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares. This is important if you want to start a conversation or get feedback from your audience.
When boosting a post, you can use the social media platform’s targeting options to reach a specific audience based on location, demographics, interests, and behavior. This way, you can ensure your message is seen by the people most likely to be interested in it.
You can find your most successful posts through the analytics tab, depending on which social channel you’re segmenting.
Did You Know?
33% of marketers use paid advertising to increase their brand awareness.
8. Not Interacting With Your Audience
The point of segmenting your audience is to learn more about their online behavior to help your marketing efforts.
If you’re not interacting with your target audience, you’ll likely see a drop in engagement on your social media posts. This can make it harder to gather information about your audience and segment them effectively.
In addition, your followers may feel ignored or unappreciated, which can cause them to stop following your accounts or become less interested in your content. If you don’t engage with your audience, you’ll have a hard time retaining them in the long run.
In general, interacting with your audience is an important part of building and maintaining a strong social media presence. It also helps you get to know their needs and preferences better.
Did You Know?
Consumers are inclined to switch to brands that address their needs – 52% said they’d switch brands if they didn’t receive tailored messages and offers.
9. Not Diversifying Your Content
Another mistake you should avoid when segmenting your audience is sticking to one content type or format. We recommend you create unique content for the different social media platforms, as they all work differently.
Even if you only share text content, you should change things up and try videos. If they weren’t effective, 54% of marketers wouldn’t agree that videos are the most valuable content type to achieve social media marketing goals.
Create more short-form videos for all your social platforms. Use landscape or portrait videos to grab your audience’s attention. Finally, don’t just share your content.
Pick up on trends and try to start a conversation with your audience about them. Choose general and audience-specific topics and create content from them.
Share user-generated content from your customers, so they feel included, heard, and cared about. Everything competes for your audience’s attention. Your content needs to stand out and intrigue your customers.
Did You Know?
The top three types of content created by marketing teams in 2022 included videos, blogs, and images.
10. Having Unrealistic Expectations
Before segmenting your audience and launching marketing campaigns, ensure you don’t set too many unrealistic goals.
Use built-in social network analytics tools to evaluate growth over time and determine what can be accomplished with your audience segmentation. Just as you use analytics to track, measure, optimize, and predict the performance of other email and SEO campaigns, you can do the same for social media.
Measure the quality of your followers, your posts’ engagement, and your content’s impact to find out which places need optimization. Define your social KPIs, demographic filters, and what numbers count as success or failure. This way, you can easily determine which metrics are important for your campaign.
Did You Know?
70% of surveyed marketers said they had set marketing goals for their initiatives, projects, and campaigns. 47% of marketers who set goals indicated that they were successful most of the time or all the time.
11. Not Having Customer Journey Maps
A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s interaction with a company. It provides insight into the desires and concerns of potential customers that directly influence or constrain their behavior.
Understanding and addressing these needs is important in achieving the desired results in any marketing campaign.
Typically, most audience segmentation tools focus on behavioral segmentation. However, careful analysis of historical data increases your chances of predicting your customers’ next moves.
With this knowledge, you can create an accurate and detailed customer journey map that tells you how and where to deliver your content for optimal impact. This increases your chances of moving your customers to the next stage of their buyer journey.
Did You Know?
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t customer-centric.
12. Not Understanding Customer Triggers
- What kind of content influences your customers to buy your product?
- What makes them tell their friends about you?
- What content reaches their emotions and makes them loyal to you?
To segment your audience, you need to know what type of content elicits the most responses. Figuring out what works for different audiences is critical to marketing.
You can make sure you’re targeting your customers in the right places by mining key data about their online habits, such as the fact that only 36% of Millennials prefer marketing content in which a person or influencer talks about a product, compared to 86% of Gen Z.
Knowing and leveraging these insights will help you identify how and when to activate your audience’s online habits in your audience segmentation strategy and future campaigns.
Did you know?
66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs.
13. Not Differentiating Between Platforms
To segment your audience and get accurate data, you need to know all the social media platforms your audience is most likely to be on and segment them by platform.
This way, you’ll have a larger sample size to test content and break down the audience demographics on each platform to optimize your messages and target the right people.
For example, let’s say you’re a small business owner selling handmade jewelry. You have a website where you sell your products and a presence on several social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
On Instagram, you primarily attract young, fashion-conscious people between 18 and 35 interested in unique, handmade pieces.
On Facebook, your audience is more diverse and includes people of all ages. You have a mix of younger and older followers, as well as people from different geographic regions.
On Pinterest, unlike other platforms, you have a predominantly female audience, women in their 20s and 40s who are interested in accessories and home decor.
As you can see, each platform has its own audience, and it’s important to keep that in mind when segmenting your audience.
Conversely, factors like geographic location can influence the platforms you choose. For example, if you want to launch a product in South Korea, consider establishing a brand presence on KakaoTalk.
Ultimately, you should not limit your market data to a single platform for segmenting your audience.
Did You Know?
You can get a much higher engagement rate for posts if you tag them with another location or user.
14. Not Using Wholistic Segmentation
In audience segmentation, it’s best to streamline processes and identify patterns that show your audience’s behavior and relevance to marketing goals.
Identifying patterns in audience behavior on social media can look like tracking engagement metrics of your posts, such as likes, comments, and shares.
Let’s say you run a fashion brand and have a presence on Instagram. You might notice that posts with new collections get more likes and comments than other posts and that your audience is most active on the platform in the evenings.
This information can help you shape your content strategy to focus on showcasing your products and posting them at times when your audience is most likely to see them.
You can also use analytics to track how users interact with your content. These tools tell you the demographics of your audience, as well as their interests and behaviors on the platform.
When you analyze this data, you’ll see what types of content are most popular with your audience and when they’re most active on the platform.
Did You Know?
Through segmentation, companies are 60% more likely to understand customers’ challenges and concerns and 130% more likely to know their intentions.
Conclusion
Social media audience segmentation is an important aspect of marketing that helps you focus on your main target audience and create tailored messages that are most likely to increase conversion rates.
If you avoid the things listed in the article above, you can easily segment your audience on any social media platform and get the desired results. We hope they’ll be useful to you in segmenting your audience.