Everything You Need to Know About Audience Segmentation

With your first money-making blog, you may be tempted to target the biggest possible audience, writing content that could apply to everybody. This seems like a logical move, since you’ll be working with a much larger pool of potential customers and readers, but in reality, it’s better to split your audience into different segments—or narrow your focus to one segment, in particular. This is known as audience segmentation, and it’s one of the best strategies for maximizing the profitability of your blog.

But why is this the case, and how can you accomplish it?

Why Audience Segmentation Works

Audience segmentation allows you to focus on smaller, more specific groups of people, rather than one generalized group. It’s better for your blog in the following ways:

• Value maximization. Imagine you have one group of customers worth $300 each, and one group worth $100. If you spend equal time between them, you’ll average a value of $200, but if you spend most of your time targeting the $300 customers, you’ll end up making more revenue. Audience segmentation is, in part, a way to maximize the value of your time.

• Decreased competition. If you’re only working with one audience segment, you won’t be competing with as many other bloggers. The more specific your audience is, the fewer people you’ll have to contend with.

• Volume vs. relevance. Using audience segmentation involves a trade of volume for relevance, which should improve your overall results. Instead of spending limited effort on a large number of people, you’ll be spending significant effort on a small number of people.

How to Define and Target Your Audiences

So if audience segmentation is so important, how can you accomplish it? The strategy boils down to two main points: defining your audience, then targeting them with your content.

• Perform initial market research. You need to know who your targets are before you finalize a specific target. Tap into census data, consumer surveys, and other statistical data to start defining who your target audience is. Ask yourself serious questions about your “average” target reader—how old are they? What do they like? What are their values? Collect your potential readers into groups, defining them with customer personas, and move on to the next step.

• Narrow your targets based on value, competition, and familiarity. Now, you’ll need to figure out which of those groups is going to be the most valuable to you. Look at the value of each group—is one more likely to buy from you than another? If so, they should take priority. Is there increased competition for one group? Rule them out. How familiar are you with marketing to each particular group?

• Optimize your blog. Once you’ve decided on a primary target audience, you’ll need to optimize your blog for that audience. You can do that by changing the name of the blog, tweaking the design, and changing your meta descriptions and taglines to appeal to your target demographic. If you have a backlog of content that doesn’t apply to your target demographic, feel free to leave it in place, but all your future content should focus on your new audience.

• Create and maintain a consistent brand voice. With a customer persona in place, you’ll need to create and maintain a consistent brand voice. You’ll need to work with a vocabulary appropriate to your audience, and develop a tone that’s most likely to appeal to your audience members. It will take practice to get this consistent, but it’s well worth the effort.

• Offer multiple post categories. If you’re targeting multiple audiences on the same blog (not recommended for beginners), you’ll want to create multiple article categories on your blog, so readers can immediately and easily tell which blog posts are meant for them, specifically. If you want to get more in-depth, you can create an entire subdomain for your separate target audience, or even start a separate related brand.

• Use reader feedback to shift and improve. You probably won’t nail a perfect strategy the first time you set up the blog. You’ll need to listen to reader feedback in order to improve. Look at objective metrics, including traffic and social shares, as well as subjective metrics, like reader comments and responses to reader surveys. Your readers will help you figure out the weak points of your segmentation strategy.

No matter what type of content you’re producing, audience segmentation is going to help you see better results. If you’re just getting started, get acquainted with the strategy by selecting only one target audience. When you’ve established a foundation with it, you can layer in new target audiences to expand your reach. Success in blogging is a marathon, not a sprint, so remain patient and focus on improving what you can.