To make stronger connections with your audience, it's crucial to know who you're talking to. Segmenting your audience is a way to gain a better understanding of your demographic and to speak to their needs and wants authentically.

Never Assume to Know your Audience

Challenge your assumptions about your audience with evidence-based research. Different audiences have unique drivers, pain points, and preferences, and segmenting your audience will help you to speak to them more authentically, building trust and loyalty in the process. While hiring a professional marketer is beneficial, you can uncover basic demographic information yourself. Here are some tips to get started with your own research.

Why Segmentation and Personas are Important

How we communicate with others forms an instant impression that is really tricky to reverse. According to a recent study, even the first few words you utter in conversation can tell someone whether or not you will 'fit' in their circle.

And the same goes for your online content. You may not be Joe Blogs, who loves a Guinness and a copy of Farmer's Weekly, but knowing that Joe Blogs (and others like him) does, will give you an invitation to discuss his utility/insurance/model train needs - or whatever it is that you're looking to sell.

How to Segment your Audience

Whether you’re selling many goods or services, or just the one - you’re likely to have different audiences who buy for different reasons. Audience segmentation helps to visualise and concretise a target audience, and decide where your energy should be spent. Insights from platforms such as Google, Jetpack, Meta, LinkedIn, etc) can provide a range of data to help you segment your audience, including location, age, gender and search phrase.

Use Similarities Across Your Target Demographic

For example, you might find that many females, in their thirties and high earners, click on your pages about health. There's one of your segments! When you're writing on health, you will want to make sure that you create content that fits with this segment of your audience. This includes pivoting a little, writing about broader aspects of their lifestyle. Why? You're adding value to their time on your platform by providing content that will appeal to them. Importantly, this signals to your audience that you don't just care about selling your product or service - but about building genuine connections, too. Here are some of the most common categories to segment your audience by. Each provides a nugget of wisdom that you can use to better align your content to their interests. Demographic segmentation – Age – Gender – Education – Income Geographic segmentation – Where they live – Where they work Psychographic segmentation – Values – Hopes and fears – Attitudes Behavioural segmentation – How they buy – What they look for – Spending habits

How to Create Customer Personae

A customer persona - or avatar - is an informed profile of your ideal customer. Skipping this critical step in gaining intimate knowledge of your demographic can have a devastating impact on your sales, as opportunities are missed on targeting what that demographic really cares about. So do a little research; find out how your offering fits into their lifestyle and how it addresses specific problems for that particular group. Below is an example of how creating a customer persona can help you fine-tune your offering for better results ...

Creating and Using Customer Personae - Example

Let's say you are selling Insurance. You've looked at your insights and found that a large number of people clicking on your packages are young, male and come from working-class areas in the North of England and come through a reward voucher offer. You have another significant audience which is older, spends more when they purchase by phone, but yields a high online cart drop-off rate. This suggests that they are interested, but something is getting in the way of the final transaction:

Persona A.

Charlie: In his 30s and a home renter. Tradesman living in the North of England. Impulsive technophile who loves a bargain. This might be the customer persona of someone who would buy a bronze package of home insurance service. You might decide that it's of interest to those who don’t have too much cash to spare, have low assets, and won't spend too much time shopping around for necessities that don't interest them. So, tying all the pieces together, you might decide that the benefits of your service to Charlie might be that your process is quick, simple, online, and your offer focuses on a reward voucher as a thank you. Your content would be friendly, simple, no-nonsense and relate to the joys and hassles of ordinary life.

Persona B.

Lisa: 50s, homeowner with grown-up family. Loves her Irish Wolf-hounds and lives in Cheshire. Likes a good wine. Technophobe. It's likely that your gold package customers will have different drivers. They might want quality of service over simplicity, are more likely to read the small print and take their time browsing over various options. Lisa is less prohibited by cost and more interested in covering her contents effectively. Here, you might use more in-depth information, a call to action to phone, and an air of exclusivity in your imagery.  Once you have a clear image in your mind of who you’re speaking to, it's easier to connect with them on their level, using their language to get your message across.

To be clear, you're not changing your brand message - you're being more inclusive to your specific demographic by moulding your message to your audience's frame of reference.

Use Your Customer Persona When You Write

With a little more inside knowledge, you can begin building your campaigns, blog content and social posts with a greater chance of success. I've sketched my customer personas and have even given them names, to help focus on the qualities and behaviours they have when I write content for them. For example, my blog on 'boosting your online shop brand' is specifically created around my customer persona, Jenny, who is a young mum in her late twenties with a candle-making startup, working part-time in admin, and finding it hard to get her shop noticed. My tone of voice is friendly and accessible, because start-ups like Jenny find the whole marketing affair a little daunting. It also helps to gauge where you post, as well as what you post in your social media. If I’m posting on LinkedIn, it’s likely to be more in-depth than a post I write for Facebook. This is because the majority of Facebook contacts that I post for are self-employed startups, or might appreciate bite-sized information over hefty tomes. Language, again, can exclude or engage your audience, depending on how you pitch it. Having an avatar to 'speak to' as you write helps you to communicate in a way that your audience feel heard and understood - by your brand.

A Brief Cautionary Tale 🙂

A few years back, a friend asked a quick favour - a poster for a much younger target audience than I’m used to. It was a poster about not giving in to peer pressure to smoke.

I wasn't keen. The last time I knew the mind of a teenager, I was busy hating being one.

After a few quick sketches, I had nothing that didn't seem the poster equivalent of Mrs Doubtfire's  "Yo yo make a wicked cup of co-coa". I sent the least offending one of a small girl doing a mike-drop with ‘RESPECT!’ in a speech bubble, and then ‘...my right to say 'no'’, beneath it.

Any self-respecting young teen would have used the poster to light their roll-up.

A few days later, my friend sent me a pic of the graffiti'd poster in situ. The microphone, was now billowing smoke - and scribbled beneath it: 'so thats where ma bong went' .

Know your audience. (And sometimes, just say 'no' to favours)

'Be the Ball'

Writers create content for people they're not, every day, but we get a good grasp of our audiences before we put pen to paper (usually). And with new audiences, it's even more important to get it right, or they'll disappear as quickly as they came.

So if you’re just looking for the skinny on this blog, here’s the main message: Content that doesn't use your audience's language, even if it sounds authentic, may fall on deaf ears. They won't burn you at the stake for it; they’ll think it’s just not meant for them and move on. However, content that is clearly trying to speak their lingo, and fails miserably, makes your whole brand seem fraudulent, out-of-touch or insincere in your intentions. Like my Mrs Doubtfire fail, or, more impressively, the recent Government Covid ad that offended at least half of the UK population. When you segment your audience and build customer personas before you start, you are more likely to avoid these pitfalls. Take the time to truly understand your customers, and you'll build a foundation of trust and loyalty; by focusing on their specific needs, you create meaningful connections. And isn't that the holy grail of building a brand that sells ...?