Market segmentation is the process of dividing your target audience into several homogeneous groups that will perceive your messages in relatively similar ways. Your business will attract more and more customers, and the campaigns you do will bring you the best results if you target an audience that has a real need for your product or service.

Why is it necessary to establish the target audience?

You've probably seen an ad that has nothing to do with you or your needs. On the other hand, even companies that do such targeting waste budgets in vain and do not get the expected results, ending up losing confidence in online marketing over time.

Targeting only target customer segments is important for all your online marketing activities, from sponsorships to copywriting. Thus, to know your customer's avatar, you must be interested in the following characteristics: income level, age, gender, location, interests, education, social status, field of activity, family status, and hobbies.

Here are some helpful questions to help you determine your customer avatar:

• What age is the avatar?
• Where does the avatar live?
• Is he female or male?
• What are the avatar's purposes?
• What are the avatar values?
• What is the avatar's family situation?
• How many children does the avatar have and how old are they?
• What are the most important features of the avatar on a personal level?

You should also do your homework on the chapters:

• His values are examples of values the avatar can have: family, religion, and a healthy lifestyle.
• His fears, for example: there is no store in his region.
• His objections, for example: "it's expensive" or "It's far".
• His primary sources of information eg: television, social media, press.

Next, audience segmentation will be done according to 4 criteria:

1) geographically

2) demographic

3) Behaviourist – takes into account several variables:

- the purchase/purchase occasion variable;

- the variable of the benefit sought;

- user status variable (non-user / new user / regular / ex-user);

- rate of use (light - weak/medium - medium/hard user - a lot).

4) psychographic – the VALS model/values and lifestyle - values and lifestyle.

Target audience analysis tools and methods:

1. Facebook insights: provides real data of Facebook users. Here you can get an Impression of the audience, according to various targeting parameters: Demographic, Geographical, Brand Connection, as well as by Interests.
   Google Analytics provides demographic statistics about website visitors, which can be further segmented by:

• Devices
• Cities
• Traffic sources
• Launched campaigns
• Behavior on the site.

3. You can use historical site data, from CRM, and audiences from Yandex.Metrika, data from Google Ads, etc. – all of which will help you better understand who has a natural affinity for your product or service.

Avatar creation process:

Avatar or Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional description of a customer category. Writing this description starts with creating the right customer groups. They must be homogeneous and medium in size, the large ones being impossible to homogenize, and on the small ones, it is possible to lose a lot of resources and quickly cap. Next, you need to place these Buyer Personas in a Buyer's Journey, which describes the path the customer takes until the purchase. Those 3 big stages in a buyer's journey are awareness, consideration, and purchase.

Each stage in the customer journey comes with specific marketing messages, keywords relevant to the audience's problems at that stage, and tailored communication channels.

Targeting customers through content

Every self-respecting marketer knows that targeting is an extremely meticulous but also vital process in promoting a business, and how visible and notorious a business will become in the eyes of customers depends on it. Therefore, from our own experience, we can say that increased attention is vital in this segment.

And in order not to remain declarative, here are some rules that we have already tried, in several marketing strategies, and which gave very good results for the promoted brands. Be ready to invest time and creativity in what you do, otherwise - success will stay away from you.

1. Formulate the advertising message taking into account a few strictures:

• Customer Needs - What do you offer to make them join you? The focus is on the utility of the product/service.
• Customer Desires - Market forecasts and analysis tools discussed earlier can provide enough data to understand customer desires. For example, in modeling the situation of a micro-finance company, we understand from the start that the emphasis should be on "quick money," "lack of bureaucratic barriers," and "no additional documents."
• Customer Possibilities - Here the rule "don't cut the branch from under your feet" works well, meaning don't set impossible limits so that you end up with a very small circle of customers. Yes, some exclusive products do that by their nature, but even in their case, a suitable message can bring them closer to other customer categories.

2. Be sincere in the formulation of advertising content - in a world of appearances, this would sound like an impossible mission, but, take our word for it, nowadays customers easily distinguish anything superficial or artificial. Don't forget that organic, aesthetic content can bring you to the top of your preferences. A studio photo doesn't always get the right engagement. Reality is, as I mentioned, a currency that never devalues.

3. Target with useful information – many times in both SMM and SEO we advise our clients to use relevant information, i.e. provide useful content to customers. Yes, this involves extra work, documentation, and time investment, but the desired effect will not be long in coming. A customer who is constantly informed by you is automatically a loyal customer, who will give you his trust in exchange for a quality product/service. By entering keywords, and links and providing customers with concrete data, you manage not only to target effectively but also to create a community around your product/service.

4. Use retargeting - Statistics show that 67.91% of online store visitors do not complete an order, even if they have added a product to their cart. This means that 7 out of 10 people who have already shown an interest in a product end up not buying it anyway! So what is the solution in this case? If we don't want them to be just lost leads, we adjust the message and remind them (nicely) about us. For example, we launch a campaign for a housing agency, but it turns out that only half of the predicted audience ends up signing a contract. The other half stops at the prospecting or cold-calling stage. In this case, the following message should be focused on the idea of: "the right offer for you", "the home you have been looking for for so long" or, why not, "now or never". The use of psychological triggers is welcome, as long as it is not too tiring or aggressive. You just don't want to scare away your potential customers?

Reiterating the previously mentioned, don't forget the targeting conditions:

• Geographical targeting – you don't want to spend unnecessary budgets for an area too far from you if you don't have great plans and possibilities for transport or delivery;
• Social-demographic targeting - analyzes the specifics of the created product and brings it exactly to the person who needs it, according to age/gender / social affiliation criteria;
• Behavioral targeting – again we come back to effectively predicting a consumer's behavior. In this case, you are effectively helped by market studies, figures from Analitycs & Yandex.metrika, or direct customer surveys, so that you can sketch your perfect consumer portrait.
• Topic targeting – the content provided must be conveyed to give the customer an overview of the nature of the product or service.

The golden rule is that targeting must become part of the business communication strategy. How you reach your customer is an extremely important goal that requires commitment, effort, and hard work.

We can help you determine your target audiences and target them with the right messages. We have a team of qualified experts and a portfolio of more than 400 satisfied customers. Call us at +373 69 809 235 (Moldova), + 40721 536 067 (Romania), or leave us a message at info@seolitte.com.