Audience Segmentation 101 for CRE

Marketing campaigns take a lot to launch: From writing the material to formatting and launching it across multiple marketing channels. Therefore, having very few impressions and conversions from a campaign can be incredibly frustrating. But a marketing campaign is only as good as its research. A significant part of this research is understanding your audience. 

 

What Is Audience Segmentation?

The truth is that every member of your audience is a different individual. It would be ideal, but impossible, to speak to each of their individual needs and struggles. However, you can group parts of your audience into categories based on shared characteristics. This is called segmentation. 

In our eBook on CRE audience segmentation, we’ll show you how to group prospects and tailor your marketing messaging according to each audience segment. The result? Your sales and marketing campaigns will get the engagement that they deserve. 

 

How To Segment Your Audience

In this section of our eBook, we discuss collecting data and defining your audience segments. Specifically, we cover gathering the data with the criteria you’ll use to segment your audience, with examples of B2B audience or customer segmentation.

 

These steps for defining your audience segments look a bit like this:

• Gathering and organizing relevant data

• Defining audience segments based on relevant data

• Identifying useful tools to automate segmentation

• Creating messaging around your audience segments

• Testing, optimizing, and refining your segments.

 

Applying Your Audience Segmentation to Different Marketing Channels

Now comes the time to apply the audience segments that you’ve built to your different marketing channels. Many businesses make the mistake of applying audience segments to only one marketing channel, such as email marketing. Here are a few examples of different marketing channels that your business should be applying audience segmentation research to:

 

Email campaigns

Automated email marketing to your audience. When applying segmentation, your business will track engagement with email marketing with the open rates, subscription rates, and conversions to your website. 

 

Paid advertising

Use audience segmentation to refine and target your ad campaigns. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads and Programmatic Ads allow you to upload your segmented data to create custom paid advertisement messaging.

 

Website content

This is the content that you populate your website with, which can actually be different depending on that audience segment!

​

Tracking and Optimizing Segmentation

Your efforts in audience segmentation, unfortunately, aren’t entirely evergreen. Many businesses make the mistake of setting up audience segmentation and assuming that they can use them indefinitely. The truth is that your audience evolves and changes over time. Therefore, so does your audience segmentation and marketing. To track and optimize your segmentation:

• Set clear goals for success in each audience segment.

• Track marketing and sales metrics for your segments.

• Be prepared to change and update your audience segments as the market evolves.