An audience segmentation strategy can help small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) make the most out of their limited marketing budgets. Here’s what you need to know.

Target Audience Segmentation Strategy Yields Best Results for SMBs

Money is Tight

It’s no surprise that SMBs have more limited marketing budgets than their larger counterparts. Budget is actually the biggest marketing challenge faced by SMBs today, according to research from taradel. The majority of SMBs dedicate less than $500 per month to advertising:

$0-$400: Nearly 50% of SMBs
$500-$999: About 20%
$1,000-$2,499: About 20%
$2,500-$4,999: A little over 10%
$10,000-$24,999: About 10%
Every other amount: Less than 10%

So, you can see it’s critical to make sure every dollar they spend on advertising counts.

The State of SMB Marketing

Here’s the breakdown of how SMBs say their marketing efforts are faring, according to taradel:

“Our marketing is highly effective!”: 11%
“It’s somewhat effective.”: 37%
“We’re breaking even.”: 19%
“… Our marketing isn’t effective.”: 22%

89% of SMBs know that there’s room for improvement in their marketing strategies and they could use some help. One of the best ways to get the most out of their budget is to get their ads in front of the right consumers. An audience segmentation strategy can help.

Audience Targeting

Don’t worry, it won’t take much to help SMBs see the light about an audience segmentation strategy. Taradel says that they realize that “audience targeting is the biggest ‘pain point’ in marketing strategy execution.”

If your SMB clients don’t already see the value in enhancing or creating an audience segmentation strategy, just reference how it can help them achieve the biggest goals of most SMBs. Those are boosting sales and generating leads.

Before you can start the segmentation process, you have to know the details of your client’s target audience. You can get started on AudienceSCAN on AdMall by SalesFuel. You can look up information on audiences from Small Business Saturday Shoppers to Greeting Card Shoppers. There, you can look up lifestyle information on the members of that audience, including:

Gender, age, average household income, etc.
Occupation and commute
Personal interests
Self-identification
Causes and charities they care about and support
Advertising information
So much more

Based on that information, you and your SMB client will know exactly who their ads should be catered to and how to do it.

Audience Segmentation

To clarify, “audience segmentation is a marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within the target audience in order to deliver more tailored messaging and build stronger connections,” says MailChimp. Those subgroups can include, but are not limited to:

Where they live
Their gender identity
Age
Ethnicity
Income
Education level

Do those categories sound familiar? Yup, you can look almost all of those up on AudienceSCAN.

Of course, there is some information necessary for their audience segmentation strategy that they can only gather themselves. Purchasing history and how they’ve interacted with your client’s website can also provide important subgroups to cater ad messaging to.

Why It Matters

An audience segmentation strategy has multiple benefits. A major one is that your SMB client doesn’t miss out on targeting potential customers with ads. Another is making ads more relevant to audiences they may not have thought of before. Personalization is so important to consumers nowadays. They expect ads to be relevant to their needs or else they’ll ignore the ads. When you combine those benefits, your client is bound to see better conversion rates, increased customer loyalty and more leads.

If your SMB client is looking for a way to boost their sales and make their ad dollars go further, you need to help them put an audience segmentation strategy together.

Photo by Nicholas Green