In today’s age, mobile advertising currency is measured in the form of audience segmentation and not impressions. A winning campaign now translates to the brand’s ability to convert prospects into engaged users and brand loyalists on mobile.
In other words, mobile businesses need to thoroughly understand their core target audience to drive long-term growth and revenues. The ability to accurately determine the audience of choice will emerge as a brand’s competitive differentiator as we move deeper into a data-driven world. This is where audience segmentation becomes key.
This blog will decode audience segmentation with valuable tips, examples, best practices, and more. Let’s jump right in.
What is Audience Segmentation?
In essence, audience segmentation is part of a mobile advertising strategy that helps identify subgroups of users with shared traits, behaviors, attitudes, and characteristics within your target user base to deliver more personalized messaging and connect better with the end-users.
Typically, there are different types of audience segmentation, such as:
- Geographic and location-based, which helps understand where your customers are located.
- Demographic such as age, gender, income, etc., helps understand who your customers are.
- Psychographic helps to know how your customers think.
- Technographic helps understand what kind of technology your users prefer.
- Behavioral, which helps understand how your customers behave on your app.
Why Do You Need to Get Audience Segmentation Right?
Mobile or not, audience segmentation forms the very fabric of your marketing strategy. It is an extension of your business’s vision and the big problem it is trying to solve.
Audience segmentation becomes imperative as no customer is the same, especially while running programmatic mobile campaigns. It is vital to clearly understand what interests, pain points, motivations, and traits define your prospects and use that to determine various audience segments.
Mobile segmentation is all about grouping existing/potential customers based on unique shared criteria. This type of granular and targeted mobile campaign can empower the brand to roll out personalized campaigns based on the extracted data sets of the segmented groups.
You must segment your audience strategically to reach only the right users and drive on-point engagement with your app. Without this, you would simply be squandering your advertising budgets with no actual results your app needs.
Finally, it helps to know that audience segmentation brings focus to your marketing strategy and helps you understand whom to ignore. It works on the premise that if you’re catering to everyone, you’re resonating with no one.
Audience Segmentation Examples for Retargeting Campaigns
Audiences are not static, and users and their behavior morph through time, so segmentation is the way to keep your campaigns relevant. Generally speaking, you can segment customers by time period by factoring in data touch points such as the day of install, total time spent (both user and per session) on the app, and time last seen.
Brands also segment users by revenue in terms of frequency, first and last revenue event, and total spend. Other popular identifiers include device type, language, and geographic location.
eCommerce apps
eCommerce apps thrive on revenue. As a result, the common identifiers for audience segmentation and retargeting comprise of:
- How users purchase
- Where they make the purchase
- What they’re willing to buy
- How much do they want to spend
- Which marketing campaigns led to successful purchases and promotions
You can create in-depth and accurate buyer personas that reflect your target audience to the T based on the information gathered.
Gaming apps
Gaming brands often segment users based on indicators such as ‘leveling up’ or ‘achievements unlocked.’ The idea is to track the user’s progress within the game.
Marketers should look at additional identifiers, including device type, conversion rates across devices, time per session/user, and revenue generated from in-game purchases.
Without segmenting the customer and extracting actionable insights into their behavior and personality, targeting users with relevant and customized messaging is impossible.
Travel apps
The holy grail lies with revenue-based events for audience segmentation for travel apps. Marketers can also group users based on:
- Frequency of travel.
- Rewards or incentives leveraged.
- Geo-location features.
- Behavioral travel characteristics such as preferred locations.
Top 4 Tips to Segment Your Audience Successfully
1. Drive consistent and incrementality testing: Always make it a point to drive continuous testing on diverse ad networks with new segments. It would help if you also ran incrementality testing on segments with a laser focus on messaging and creatives.
2. Look at granular data: When it comes to accurate audience segmentation, it is key to look at granular engagement data. For example, you can analyze attribution data, which is the building block for all segmentation types. This also includes key activities such as:
- The path to install via organic or non-organic means.
- In-app events such as post-install actions. In-app purchases.
- Putting an item in a shopping cart.
Analyzing these activities can help create more targeted segments.
3. Engage in deep linking and implement frequency capping: For deep linking to work, you need to complement it with your personalized messaging. This can create highly-relevant messages for your customers and amplify the brand’s message ten-fold. Additionally, as a thumb rule, execute a frequency cap for segment-specific campaigns to not overwhelm or bombard the users.
4. Consider whether any new segments can be created from existing segments: Finally, leverage an internal CRM or BI tool to see if you can create new segments out of your existing customers instead of starting out from scratch.
Tying It All Together
Audience segmentation is the foundation on which a personalized, ROI-driven, and effective programmatic advertising campaign can be built. It serves as the north star for your marketing and sales teams to be able to connect with customers on a deeper – as opposed to a solely transactional – level.
Leverage the tips, tricks, and examples outlined above and target the right customers with the right messaging.
Without it, you are just shooting in the dark, hoping that the ideal customer sees your ad. And hope comes with a cost – your time, money, and the brand’s reputation.
Shivani Salhotra
