There are different types of models for segmenting the customers that companies can use.
The best choice tends to depend on the marketing goals of a business, and what that business might need.
Demographic
The demographic customer segmentation model means that the company will be dividing its customers into groups based on specific demographic factors such as their gender, age, marital status, income, and more.
For example, if a company has a target audience of both men and women that are over 30 years old, it shouldn’t be looking into creating a TikTok marketing campaign. This is because over 60% of the platform’s users are female, but only around 10% of the users are over 40 years old.
That means if a company decides to create a marketing campaign on TikTok, it ends up ignoring a large part of its target audience.
Instead, with a demographic customer segmentation companies will learn that with that type of target audience as in the example, the social media platform of choice should be Facebook, because most of the users on that platform tend to be of an older demographic.
Geographic Customer Segmentation
When companies are segmenting the target audience based on their location, including the location of their workplace they’re using geographic customer segmentation. This is a relatively straightforward type of customer segmentation, but one of the main disadvantages of it is actually its simplicity.
When it’s used on its own, this type of customer segmentation doesn’t help companies learn more about their target audiences.
However, when it’s used together with other types of customer segmentation models, companies can learn a lot more about their customers and create more targeted marketing campaigns.
Psychographic Customer Segmentation
Although every customer has a unique personality, all of them share some characteristics or traits.
Through psychographic customer segmentation companies can segment the target audience based on some of those shared characteristics or traits, such as their personality traits, or their values, interests, lifestyle choices, and for.
This segmentation model helps companies better understand the psyche of the customers, which in turn, helps in creating very relevant and focused marketing campaigns. However, one of the biggest challenges of this segmentation model is generating and organizing the relevant data for it.
Behavioral Customer Segmentation
Companies that want to learn more about how their customers are interacting with the business should be looking into behavioral customer segmentation. This segmentation model means that companies will be grouping customers together based on the patterns of behavior they have.
These patterns of behavior show how the customers feel about a company so that the business can determine how it can reach them successfully at any stage of the buying journey.
To use behavioral customer segmentation, companies first need to figure out which patterns of behavior they want to track, and then track that behavior to inform their marketing campaigns.
Mike Paffmann is the CEO of Virgo PR. He has previously worked as a Vice President at Clarity PR, 5WPR, and Highwire PR.
Virgo PR is a full-service digital marketing and digital PR agency that caters to clients in all industries. Paffmann has over a decade of experience in the public relations industry and has provided diverse media relations programs for brands and corporations across enterprise, software, eCommerce, technology, and consumer apps of all sizes. He has worked with clients including IBM, Genies, Glint, Rebel Ventures, AppAnnie, Owl Labs, car2go, Vkanesee, and more.
