Let's look at what segments you can divide the target audience. But first of all, we need to understand why we need this segmentation.
The main role of segmentation of the target audience is the allocation of individual segments for a product and the formation of the most optimal offers.
Suppose you have a large group for promoting social networks and at the same time you have many segments of audiences - these are marketers, businessmen, SMM specialists, SEO optimizers, contextual advertising specialists, arbitrageurs, etc.
Each segment has its own interests in the field of promoting social networks, they partially overlap, but mostly differ.
The arbitrageur is interested in new offers and CPA networks with a good upgrade (high% confirmation of leads), and the SMM-driver is interested in the features of promoting certain niches and the effectiveness of various events to attract the target audience.
But these segments are interested in cases, albeit mainly in their specific activities.
Various types of segmentation can be distinguished. Below are listed and detailed 11 basic types.
1. Age segmentation
Each age has its own problems and interests related to both the social environment and the inner world of man. Age has a fundamental impact on consumer behavior in general.
If your product is interesting to older people, then it is not necessary that it will also cause interest among young people.
It is important to highlight the upper and lower boundaries of the segment of your target audience, which could potentially be interesting for your proposal, then divide each segment into a time span of 3-5 years and then test each segment for its effectiveness. This can be done either using analytics systems, such as Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics, or by focusing on the impression / click ratio for each of the segments.
Next, you need to conclude. For example, for this product, the most profitable in terms of impressions / clicks for us are all age segments, except for the segment from 21 to 24 years old and the 45+ segment.
2. Gender segmentation
This type of segmentation is based on a gender approach to the analysis and regulation of consumer behavior.
As you know, mainly women and men have different interests.
If we go to the hypermarket, we will see the following. A man moves around the store at the speed of his car, holding a note in one hand and a trolley in the other. He is still mentally driving, so he is trying to overtake others. Only this happens before meeting with the department of technology or the department for motorists.
And how will a woman behave in the same hypermarket? She will stand in front of the rack with detergents and at this time her computer in her head will lay out what she saw at prices and correlate them with the contents of the wallet.
3. Geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation depends on the specifics of the project, that is, whether it is urban, is aimed at the region, the whole country or works around the world.
Let's look at this type of segmentation, starting from the very first level - segmentation by streets / metro stations.
This level allows you to target residents living within walking distance of the promoted product. This is usually an offline business, the most striking examples are cafes and flower shops.
The next level is segmentation by district of a certain city.
It works well with city pubs and niches oriented to a specific area.
The third level is the target for individual cities, the most common type of geographical targeting.
If you need residents of certain cities, then this is undoubtedly our choice.
But nevertheless, it is recommended to separate Moscow and St. Petersburg into separate ads, since they are the most competitive cities and, as a result, the most expensive ones, at the cost of targeting.
The fourth level is regional segmentation. And here everything is similar to the previous level: if you need residents of a certain region, then we choose this particular type of segmentation.
Moscow and St. Petersburg can also be distinguished in separate announcements.
The fifth level is segmentation throughout the country (Russia, Turkey, Sweden, etc.)
It is used when we need residents of a certain country. It is suitable mainly for online stores, or in those projects where the geographical location of the user is not important.
Targeting in the CIS is much cheaper than the Russian Federation, since competition there is much lower. Moscow and St. Petersburg, when targeting Russia, should still be highlighted in separate ads.
And the last, sixth level is a target without specifying a country, that is, targeting all users of social networks.
The fastest and ruthless target, because you can target anyone: at least a resident of Africa, at least a resident of China, the Netherlands, etc.
4. Segmentation by nationality / peoples
A rather interesting type of segmentation, which can only be determined indirectly with the help of parsers and collecting an audience of thematic publics, such as YaRussky, VKKavkaz, Armenia, etc.
Here it is necessary to take into account the fact that membership in a thematic group does not mean at all that the subscriber has an appropriate nationality, because:
a) many people are interested in other nations and nationalities;
b) subscribers just once saw in a group interesting content for themselves and decided to subscribe.
5. Device segmentation
There are 4 main categories of devices:
- smartphones;
- mobile phones;
- tablets;
- web devices, i.e. Computers
What is device segmentation for?
This is necessary in cases where your landing page design is not adaptive, that is, it does not provide the correct display of all its elements on various devices, which can lead to the fact that some elements, for example, on smartphones, will move to an unknown location, and some - just not displayed.
Another reason for segmentation is the behavioral factors associated with the use of various devices. For example, people most often use computers from home or work, smartphones and tablets - during various trips and walks. As a rule, people from web devices can pay more attention to your proposal, since purely nominally they have more time and less distractions.
6. Interest segmentation
Each user of social networks can indicate interests in his account: sports, music, ballet and the like. This makes it easy to gather people, for example, athletes, only because they indicated “sport” as one of their interests.
It should be borne in mind that a large part of users indicate a huge number of interests - it can be 20, 30, 40 and even more, and the other part does not indicate their real interests, but invented, but giving them a certain status, a positive image in the eyes of their potential target audience.
And at the same time, without the possibility of narrow targeting, this can significantly reduce the breadth of targeting, and potentially hit a more or less narrow target audience.
7. Segmentation by level of education and universities
This type of segmentation allows you to collect people with two types of education: higher and secondary.
What is it for? Let's say you are promoting a second higher education. Why do you need people who do not yet have the first higher?
And one more important point. Potentially people with secondary education are less literate and it is easier for them to "vparit" something.
But, again, many can indicate the presence of higher education without it.
This is especially true among young people under 18 years old. Therefore, it is recommended to set a limit of 18 years, if you need graduates of this year, then, given the average age of first-year students - 18 years and 4 years of undergraduate study, we set a limit of 18 to 22 years. But in this case, we will lose those who entered the university not at 18, but at any other age (17, 19 years, etc.).
You can collect people from certain educational institutions, but, again, do not forget about the following factors:
a) not everyone indicates a real university (they can indicate the place of their studies at Moscow State University instead of a real Uryupinsky college);
b) the name of many educational institutions is changing, but not everyone changes in their profile the old name of the educational institution to a new one.
8. Job Segmentation
Job segmentation is effective when we need people in a certain position (logistician, economist, designer, etc.).
Suppose you are the owner of a warehouse, and one of the segments of your target audience is the logistics of local companies. This segmentation will help you collect them, but on the condition that they specify precisely “logistic” as the position.
It is also necessary to take into account the fact that for some posts you will be collecting completely different target audience. Suppose you want to gather people with the post of "director". But when you enter this word, you will also collect the directors of the World, the Universe, and the like, that is, not your target audience, but nobody knows.
9. Segmentation by membership in thematic communities
The simplest option is segmentation by members of a certain (one) community. When creating an ad, you can specify a list of the communities your target audience is in. Suppose you specify 10 groups. Your ad will be shown to people who are members of at least one community of those you specify.
If you want to collect those who are in two or more communities, then you need to use parsers. A collection of 3 or more thematic groups allows you to cut off the unwanted target audience (bots and offers).
10. Segmentation by activity level
Such segmentation allows you to divide the target audience according to their level of activity - likes, reposts, comments.
It is necessary to take into account the degree of activity of each of the three indicators. The weakest is like, the most powerful is commentary, since it took a person a lot more time to write it than to like a liked post simply by like.
Usually, activity is collected over the last 1-2 months and / or according to the minimum amount of activity, again to cut off part of an irrelevant audience. Such segmentation also allows you to collect the most active audience, which not only views the news of certain communities, but also actively interacts with them. It is useful in almost all niches, especially in narrow thematic and entertaining ones.
11. Segmentation by friends and subscribers
Allows you to segment users by their presence in friends or subscribers of thematic opinion leaders. This is especially effective when promoting events where these opinion leaders are scheduled to speak.
Why should this segment be divided into friends and subscribers?
Friends of opinion leaders, as a rule, are their real friends, colleagues, active fans and the like categories of people with whom they interact.
Subscribers, in turn, are those people whom the opinion leader for various reasons did not consider it necessary to add to his friends. It can be both advertising pages, and casual / annoying people who annoy the opinion leader.
In addition, you can go the opposite way: having a specific list of the target audience, find an opinion leader among her. How will the search happen in this case? By the number of friends / subscribers or friends + subscribers from your list of target audience among friends / subscribers of this person.
It is logical that the more people from your list of friends this person has, the more likely that he is for them a “leader of opinions”. Preliminarily, it is advisable to clean your list of target audience from bots and offers.
