How can brands create more targeted marketing?

The increasing concern for privacy is leading to the rise of regulations that inhibit data collection. This has contributed to the ongoing problem of data depreciation, which is affecting marketing strategy, planning, and optimisation. As a result, data management platforms are facing limitations in their ability to augment and activate audiences for targeting.

That also means traditional customer segmentation is, in many ways, limited as well. So, brands have to start embracing AI-enabled customer segmentation instead.

Making the transition with social intelligence

With the ability to extract deep and expansive consumer insights, social intelligence plays an important role in the transition to AI-enabled customer segmentation. It can assist the transition with:

- The type of segmentation it can offer due to the nature of the data
- The ability to feed different use cases
- The ability to benchmark any audience with another audience

As a result, social intelligence allows you to really surface the differences between different segments of your audience. And you can uncover the insights that are key to interoperability between different platforms and data sources.

Main pitfalls to avoid in customer segmentation

To streamline efforts and ensure accurate segments, brands must take care to avoid the following challenges around customer segmentation:

Signal overload

With a bunch of different signal sources available, you need to find the ones that really matter to your brand. Focus on the sources that have the most significance to your audience or brand category at the early stages so you can make the process more efficient.

Over reliance on AI

Whilst it can be tempting to let AI do all the work to get to the desired answer, you also need an equal amount of human involvement. Human curation, creativity, and leadership are essential to point the AI in the right direction.

Not solving specific business problems

You should also make sure that you’re segmenting the right audience in the right way to actually solve the business problems that your organization is facing.

Relying on action/desired action as a compass

Brands can sometimes become too focused on the desired action of the consumer when segmenting them. Instead, you should be focusing on intention, attention, and likelihood.

How social data plays into consumer segmentation

For different types of research, social data is essential to give the human angle and the human behaviour aspect. This will help you discover how your brand can really relate to the consumer.

It doesn’t only give you insights into the trends and tone of conversation but also how people interact and how they’re influenced. Social data can help you monitor community formation and community dynamics, which are full of clues about how people interact with brands.

As social animals, humans like being in groups and operating in groups. That inclination is mirrored on social media. And social data should be part of the research mix to keep abreast of changing consumer, societal, and human behavioural dynamics.

Developing live personas for accurate targeting

While segmentation is an important step in creating targeted marketing, it’s not where the job ends. Brands usually need segmentation to be enriched or to develop an audience hypothesis from scratch. The next step is to build personas.

Companies can use their CRM and first-party data to gain an audience understanding that’s reflective of the business reality. By layering this with an audience understanding that’s reflective of mindsets, they can get a picture of the model audience.

Now you need to bring together the people you initially pulled apart through segmentation. Live personas can help you do just that. This involves looking at audiences in context by identifying their product behaviours or behaviours in relation to the category or the brand. Beyond that, you should consider their personal interests and their cultural relevance.

You also want to answer the why, what, where, and when in relation to audience behaviour and characteristics. Look for overlaps that will help you develop a more engaging addressable media. The goal is to target engaging concepts; not identities. These concepts will have nuances, overlaps, sweet spots to help you relate to your target audience better.

It’s also important to ask questions such as – Are your personas different enough? Do they represent significant commercial value? Can they be constructed and targeted efficiently? Can they be converted effectively?

Using social data for better segmentation and targeting

With huge amounts of relevant conversational and behavioural data available, social intelligence plays a crucial role in consumer segmentation, which ultimately helps with more targeted marketing.