Your customers are diverse—behaviorally, demographically, and psychographically.
A key component of building your business and a critical aspect of marketing success is developing relationships with your consumers. Relationships transcend single transactions. They’re born from consistent brand experiences which lead to brand trust and brand loyalty. Consumers who are willing to engage with your brand and develop a relationship with it are also likely to advocate your brand to others, giving your business the most powerful form of marketing available—word-of-mouth.
To develop relationships with your target customers, you need to be where they are. Social media, content marketing, event marketing, advertising—they each play a role in surrounding consumers with your branded content so they can self-select how they want to interact with your brand. However, a one-size-fits-all approach will not help you build customer relationships.
People are different, and so are your customers. Just about every business, brand, and product has a diverse set of users, and you need to make an effort to build relationships between these diverse consumers and your brand. That means you need to create messages that are meaningful to them. You need to speak to them in a language they understand and use words and experiences that are relevant to them. In other words, you need to research, study, analyze, and segment your customer audiences.
That’s the secret to developing relationships with diverse customer audiences—segmentation. Start by developing buyer personas for your largest customer segments. Who buys your product? What problems does your product solve? How do they use your product? What do they say about your product? Don’t rely solely on demographic segmentation. Today, a buyer persona requires more than a snapshot of a customer’s age, education, income, gender, race, and family status. Behaviors matter, and your buyer personas must consider those behaviors. Emotions matter, too. If psychological motivations and triggers aren’t considered in your buyer personas, you’ll miss a significant opportunity to connect with your diverse customers.
Marketing segmentation requires some work. You’ll need to conduct primary and secondary research to learn about your customers. You’ll need to track your marketing efforts closely and view the results based on your market segments. Not all segments will respond the same way to your initiatives. You can’t build relationships with diverse customer audiences if you don’t know what is and isn’t working in your communications with them.
Finally, market segmentation isn’t a one-time task. You need to monitor and modify your market segments as consumers change behaviorally, demographically, and psychographically in response to their environments, the marketplace, and the world around them.
This post is sponsored by Spark BusinessSM from Capital One® and is the fourth post in a series of eight.
Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Women on Business. She is a 30-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC).
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