Your entire audience has one thing in common: a shared interest in your business. But when it comes down to the key characteristics that define your users, you’re likely to find that no two customers are quite the same. Enter market segmentation into the equation—the key to segmenting your audience into intentional groups so that your team can successfully reach these subgroups with the right targeted ads and campaigns.
While the concept of market segmentation may seem simple on the surface, it necessitates the use of the right data quality tools and technology in order to segment your audience with the most success. In this article, we’ll dive deeper into the importance of market segmentation, the role of data quality in this process, and the steps your business can take today to get started.
Market segmentation 101: What it is and why it matters
Market segmentation’s main goal is to ensure you reach your customers with messaging that best resonates with their qualities and characteristics. It achieves this by dividing your audience into subgroups based on a shared set of characteristics or interests.
Several ways you can segment your audience can include the following:
- Geographic location
- Behavioral commonalities
- Demographics
- Psychographics
Why does market segmentation matter? Put simply, market segmentation lays the foundation for any successful marketing plan by allowing targeted ads and outreach that produce more meaningful responses from your audience. When you can deliver a more customized experience to your customers, you’ll find it easier to build brand loyalty, increase order values, drive conversions, and much more.
3 ways data quality helps support successful market segmentation
Superior data isn’t an option for successful market segmentation—it's an absolute must. Below, we’ll dive into the 3 ways data quality can help support this key marketing initiative.
1. High-quality data provides comprehensive customer views
How thoroughly can you define your audience? Being able to tell a story about your customers to some degree is a prerequisite for market segmentation. Fortunately, data quality initiatives can help you paint the picture necessary to break your users up into the right subgroups.
It can be challenging to target your audience with only a few key identifiers on hand— which is why having a single customer view is crucial. With our data quality platform, you can create a single customer view with the must-have information to know who your customers are and how to reach them. With complete, high-quality records that flesh out your customer’s profile, you can more confidently outline which users to target the how you can best reach them.
2. Up-to-date data drives marketing initiatives
Your customers are continuously evolving—which means that their data likely is, too. When you first enter a user’s information into your system, you can assume that key information–including their email, phone number, and address—will likely change as time progresses. Data cleansing is a powerful tool that helps you remain on top of inevitable data changes to give you access to the most up-to-date data necessary to reach your audience.
How does it work? Data cleansing can remove incomplete, incorrect, duplicate, and incorrectly formatted data from your database. This software will automatically cleanse your data within minutes so that you can begin your market segmentation on the right foot. Segmenting your market can provide success—but only if the data guiding the segmentation is accurate. Data cleansing helps to ensure that you’re accessing data that is both optimized and reliable so that you never have to guess whether your messaging will resonate or even reach your users’ homes or inboxes with success.
3. Clean and enriched data lets your audience know you’re serious
Imagine receiving an email from a brand you’re loyal to with the wrong last name. You’re probably likely to experience the same discontent as you would receiving a brochure that doesn’t quite reflect your interests with a company. But when you receive information that addresses you accurately with the right messaging, you’re much more likely to find yourself engaged in these advertising initiatives.
Correct and personalized information tells your customers that you’re serious about their business. It also helps your company maintain a high-quality reputation, too. Consider data enrichment to add even more data to your customer profile to deep dive into your audience and more thoroughly understand the best ways to personalize messaging with these various subsets of users.
How Experian can help
At Experian, we provide businesses just like yours with the tools necessary to improve market segmentation and deploy successful marketing tactics. Connect with a data quality expert to learn more about how our data quality tools can empower your marketing decisions today.
