Segment Your Customers
Knowing who your customers are means knowing their profiles, their interests, and above all, their needs and expectations. To understand what your customer segments are, you'll need to ask yourself the right questions.
What resources can you use to help you get to know your customers?
Market analysis: this allows you to collect information on your target audience, their basic needs, and the structure of your market.
Data from your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software: demographic, geographic, and sociological data, as well as any other customer data you can collect.
Information and satisfaction surveys filled out by customers after a purchase.
Field surveys where you go out and collect feedback directly from customers.
You can also hire service providers to obtain information shared publicly by your customers on social media.
Once you've collected your data, you'll have to extract the information that's most useful for understanding your customers.
How do I get useful information?
A customer database lets you centralize all your customer profiles into a single interface, where you can view data on their buying habits, interests, and expectations.
Your customer database can be used to support all your marketing and advertising strategies. It gives you a 360° view of each customer so you can create targeted marketing campaigns.
Software solutions designed for customer information and CRM tools can help you create and build your database.
The first question you should ask yourself when creating a customer database is this:
What information should I collect on my customers?
There are three main categories of criteria you can use as a basis for segmenting your customer base:
Socio-demographic criteria, such as age, gender, marital status, address, occupation, income bracket, or education level
Behavioral criteria, which are based on how your customers behave toward your products—what kind of products they buy, how often they buy them, whether they come back and buy again, how they made their purchases. These criteria are largely what make up buying habits.
Psychographic criteria. This category encompasses all criteria based on your customers' personalities—lifestyle, interests, moral and religious beliefs, values, opinions, temperament, etc.
To what extent does my distribution strategy encourage my customers to buy?
Many factors influence the decision to buy, and some of them are specific to certain distribution channels: promotions, the geographic location and atmosphere of the point of sale, services offered such as free parking, ease of access, etc.
By sharing data from one channel to another, you can create a truly coordinated, seamless experience. An omnichannel strategy aims to:
increase your sales, both in-store and online. The omnichannel approach offers your customers the opportunity to make purchases anytime, and on any channel.
attract new customers. By providing a consistent and efficient journey, with personalized content delivered in real time, you'll attract new customers.
build customer loyalty. You'll boost your brand's image across all channels. Plus, loyal customers tend to spend more on average, which is always a good thing!
build your customer databases using a marketing information system optimized across all your distribution channels.
IKEA is, without a doubt, the brand that's most invested in the buying experience—and always has been. The company opens new stores every year. Its revenue is in constant growth, and now exceeds $40 billion worldwide.
Case Study: Home Made
What customer segments can you identify for our company, Home Made? List 10 customer segments based on the three criteria we discussed above.
It may be helpful to organize your customer segments in a table like this one:
Socio-demographic criteria | Behavioral criteria | Psychographic criteria |
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Determine the Buyer Personas of Your Customers Based on Factors From Your Market Segmentation
Why do I need a persona?
A persona allows you to focus and put a face on your customer segments, which themselves represent groups of similar individuals. That means you can have multiple personas. It's recommended that you have between three and five personas to cover all your market segments.
Creating your buyer personas should inform how you develop your strategy. Your personas will evolve as your company gets to know its current and prospective customers through marketing actions.
Ultimately, your personas should meet highly specific segmentation criteria. Companies often use special tools designed for this purpose, or they create their own buyer persona templates.
What are the characteristics of a persona?
Identity: Name, age bracket, geographic area, marital status, career, etc. This basic information serves as the foundation for your persona.
Interests: What are their hobbies outside of work? What's their background? This is a very important step, since it humanizes the persona and paints a highly detailed mental picture.
Work and career: What business are they in? What's their job? What are their career goals?
User journey: How did they find you? What was the path that led them to purchase? What kind of content do they like?
Motivations and barriers for the product and/or service: What benefit(s) will they get from the product? Why might they be hesitant to buy?
Favorite forms of media: What social networks do they use most often? What form of media are they most responsive to?
Avatar: Assigning your persona an avatar (an image that represents them) or photo is important, because it puts a face on your persona and makes it easier to remember.
How do I collect information on my personas?
Before you dive into creating your personas, you'll need to collect data. There are several different ways of gathering this information.
Analyze the company database. Internal customer data, as well as employee knowledge, are extremely useful resources. Employees who work directly with current and prospective customers have enough information to create a true-to-life persona.
Analyze the company's social networks. Once you've identified which social media networks generate the most engagement (e.g., likes, shares, comments), all you have to do is extract the best ideas from the community, which includes both current and future customers.
Analyze your own data. Where do your customer contacts (or leads) come from? What does a typical user journey—one that ends in a conversion or purchase—look like at your company?
Customer surveys. To gain a better understanding of your customer base and their buying journey, a survey conducted with a representative sample of customers can help you collect lots of information.
By defining your personas, you'll be able to optimize your marketing strategy. Since you now know what the various profiles of your target audience are, you can adapt your messaging and advertising accordingly.
This tool will guide you in creating your marketing and advertising content, since you'll know how to stick to what they want, the goal being to meet the specific demands of your target customers and to facilitate communication via personalization.
What are the advantages of this technique?
Attract qualified traffic
By adapting your content to your target audience, you'll attract qualified traffic to your website.
To achieve your goal, you'll need to put in place an editorial line that's compatible with each of your buyer personas. If you can manage to identify your target customers' expectations, you'll be able to ensure that your website comes up in response to highly specific searches, thus increasing your traffic.
Increase your conversion rates
Now that you know what your customers want, you'll be able to increase your conversion rate.
Evolve your brand and/or products
If you want to make changes to your brand or your products, you can start by looking at your buyers' behaviors. Then, based on what you've learned about your target customers' expectations, you can adapt and anticipate as needed.
Build customer loyalty
Obviously, the more you understand your customers' wants, needs, and behaviors, the easier it is to build loyalty. You'll know how best to respond to their expectations across all your communication channels—websites, blogs, newsletters, social media. If the content you offer is useful, your audience will be satisfied with their customer experience, become more loyal to your brand, and therefore be more likely to recommend you to others.
Track fluctuations in your market
Buyer personas can evolve over time. As new expectations, trends, and even behaviors arise, you'll have to pay close attention to your market. By monitoring and updating your personas regularly, you'll be able to adapt to these changes and produce content that still feels relevant.
So what does a persona actually look like?
Excellent question! You're going to create your own buyer personas. Here are two examples:
Case Study: Home Made
Using this template, create two more personas for our company, Home Made.
Let's Recap!
The best resources for getting to know your customers are market analyses, CRM data, customer surveys, field investigations, and social networks.
An omnichannel strategy aims to increase your sales, attract new customers, and build loyalty among your existing customer base.
A buyer persona is a portrait of a person who represents your ideal customer.
By crafting detailed personas, you can optimize your marketing strategy, attract qualified traffic, increase your conversion rates, improve your brand and/or products, and build customer loyalty.
So, now you have a much deeper understanding of your customers. You know how to create representations of them in the form of buyer personas.
In the next chapter, we'll see how to choose the right channels to fit your omnichannel strategy.
