How to Use Content Segmentation to Tailor Marketing Campaigns

These days, you can’t just bombard your target audience with tons of generalized content and hope something sticks. You need to do what your competitors are doing: deliver tailored, personalized marketing messages.

Of course, it would be impractical to create unique content for every single customer. However, you can identify shared characteristics among your audience and tailor content to meet the needs of these distinct groups.

This is called content segmentation and it’s capable of driving significant, long-term benefits. So, let’s dive into what it is and how you can implement it to maximize engagement, conversions, revenue, loyalty, and ROI.

What is content segmentation?

Content segmentation is the process of splitting your target audience into smaller, distinct groups and creating tailored content for each group. Customers can be segmented based on any number of characteristics: age, location, income, interests, buying behaviors, and loyalty, just to name a few. 

Free to use image from Pixabay

So, what is a segmentation example?

Let’s say that you sell a range of bags. Different customers need bags for different reasons — for school, hiking, weekend breaks, or to make a fashion statement. Rather than creating catch-all content, a content segmentation strategy would split these customers into distinct groups. Then, you might send out four distinct newsletters:

• Hiking: focused on how tough and hard wearing your bags are, featuring outdoor photography
• School: aimed at parents, discussing practicality and how easy to clean your backpacks are
• Weekenders: filled with aspirational content of beautiful getaways, and highlighting your largest bags (or those that fit in hand luggage on planes!)
• Fashion: featuring a ‘as seen in’ section, showing the magazines and celebrities that have been showing off your offerings.

Wondering why you might spend extra time doing this? Let’s take a look at why segmentation matters.

Benefits of using content segmentation

Here’s how segmenting your audience and content can drive business success.

Boosts engagement and conversions

Content segmentation increases the relevancy of your content. By knowing what your customers want, you can create resonating, need-fulfilling content on your customers’ preferred devices and platforms. 

This optimizes your content for conversions and generates engagement like click-throughs, comments, likes, and shares.

Enhances customer loyalty and retention

According to McKinsey, 71% of customers expect you to personalize experiences – and if you don’t, three-quarters of customers will grow frustrated and switch to your competitor. 

Data sourced from McKinsey

Content segmentation lets you produce content that your customers are genuinely interested in. By listening to and valuing your customers on a more human level, you develop an authentic relationship that fosters not just regular buyers, but loyal customers who recommend, advocate, and interact with your brand.

Optimizes resource allocation

The more you know about your customers — such as their preferred content types, devices, channels, interests, etc — the more resources that you can dedicate towards these areas. And, in turn, you can shift resources away from less-effective content and poor-performing channels.

Maximizes return on investment (ROI)

Content segmentation strategies allow you to hone in on specific segments to truly understand how they like to consume content. For each of your segments, you can measure and analyze content performance to get an accurate understanding of their ROI. 

Using this data, you can maximize ROI by channeling more resources into reliably high-performing content for your most engaged customer segments.

How to use content segmentation to tailor marketing campaigns

Use this step-by-step guide to tailor your marketing strategy using content segmentation.

Segment your audience into distinct groups

Start by segmenting your target audience into smaller, defined groups based on their common characteristics. The most popular segmentation methods include:

• Demographics: Age, gender, occupation, and income level are all simple but effective segmentation methods. For instance, segmenting by income ensures that you show customers items that are within their budget. 

• Geographical location: If you’re a nationwide or global company, sorting customers by their location enables you to target them with localized content. This means you can notify them of deals in their area, display prices in the correct currency, and include your localized virtual phone number in your ads.

• Behavior: This method looks at common patterns of behavior such as the web pages customers visit, how often they make purchases, the items they buy, and the benefits they seek.

• Interests: Targeting customers based on their interests helps you increase engagement. If certain customers have a favorite sports team, a shared hobby, or a preferred aesthetic, you can tailor marketing messages and ads to draw these customers in.

• Customer journey stage: This method targets customers based on where they are in their buying journey. The content you show a customer who’s just discovered your brand, for example, should be different from the content shown to a customer who’s about to convert.

Free to use image from Pexels

These are just a few examples. Other ways to segment audiences include device usage, channel preferences, engagement levels, and loyalty. To access the insights you need, collect data from marketing research, social analytics, and your CRM. And, make sure to follow data lake best practices to provide marketing analysts with a centralized data store that is complete, up-to-date, and accessible. 

Create detailed buyer personas for each segment

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. A content segmentation strategy involves creating a buyer persona for each of your distinct customer segments to tap into their unique needs.

Develop detailed profiles that define the key characteristics of each group, such as their age, location, and interests. Dig deeper to understand their purchasing motivations, pain points, challenges, values, and goals. The more comprehensive your buyer personas, the easier it will be to create resonating content. 

Develop personalized content for each persona

Now it’s time to create personalized content, taking into account your customers’ preferences. 

Consider what type of content each segment enjoys. For example, one segment might prefer video content, and the other segment might prefer blog articles or user-generated content. Take the length of the content into account too — does the segment prefer long or short-form content? How long (or short) should your videos and articles be to receive maximum engagement?

For example, Gen Z and millennial demographics tend to prefer short-form content in the form of videos or social media posts. So, if your clothing brand decides to create a segment of Gen Z fashionistas, you might target them with a series of short, binge-able videos and eye-catching infographics. 

Using everything you know about your customers’ interests, pain points, and purchasing motivations, you can infuse whatever type of content you choose with personalized messages. 

If you’re short on time, leverage a content curation tool to find and curate third-party content for your website and social media pages. It’s a resourceful way to consistently provide relevant content for your audience.

Screenshot taken from Scoop.it

And, don’t forget to track the performance of your content across channels. It’s worth simplifying streaming ingestion in your data lake so that you can access real-time insights and make time-sensitive decisions.

Tailor your content channels by segment

Each marketing channel has distinct characteristics that align them with certain types of content. 

TikTok and Instagram, for example, are highly visual platforms that primarily focus on short-form videos. YouTube is perfect for live videos as well as long and short-form videos. Other channels, like Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and emails, tend to be more text-based.

Chances are, your customer segments will have channel preferences. Gen Z and millennials say that their favorite way to interact with branded content is through social media posts (56% and 55% respectively). But for most consumers aged 45+, email is the preferred channel. 

Image sourced from Opinium 

By knowing what channels your customers use — as well as the unique features and characteristics of these channels — you can create highly optimized content to maximize engagement. 

Conduct A/B testing to compare content variations

A/B testing is the process of comparing two variations of the same content to see which one performs better, such as an email, social media post, or web page. 

To conduct an A/B test, design two versions of a piece of content, adding at least one variation. For example, you could create two email designs with a varying heading, subject line, fonts, colors, layout, or call-to-action. Then send out both two versions and measure which variation garners the most engagement and conversions.

Optimize your content for various devices

Consumers use a variety of devices to interact with branded content: desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. So, you need to make sure that your content loads, displays, and responds correctly on all of your customers’ preferred devices.

Here are the three main things to focus on:

Mobile responsiveness: Ensure that your content adapts to smaller screen sizes so that your text and images are clear and legible. If you use pop-ups, double-check that they’re non-intrusive and easy to close.

Mobile speed: If your content takes a long time to load on mobile, viewers are likely to bounce. Using methods like lazy loading, image compression, and browser caching can help you improve mobile speeds. 

Mobile content optimization: Mobile users like to browse content while they’re on their lunch break, waiting for a bus, or chilling out in front of the TV. They don’t want long-winded content — they want content that’s scannable, snackable, and to the point. Use snappy headlines, subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs.

Key takeaways

With the ability to boost engagement, conversions, loyalty, and ROI, content segmentation is a powerful technique to execute in your marketing campaigns. 

Start by segmenting your audience into distinct groups and building personas that tap into their specific needs, pain points, and desires. Create personalized content that appeals to their interests, solves their challenges, and resonates with them on a personal level — all through the devices, channels, and mediums that they prefer.