How to Use Customer Segementation to Improve Your Marketing ROI

If you ask most marketers to describe their customers, they’ll default to demographic information.

“Our customers are 60% female, have an average household income of $87,500, are college educated and live in the suburbs.”

But an accurate view of your customer goes beyond demographics and gets into attitudes, lifestyles, behaviors, life stages, life events and other behavioral attributes.

Attitudes describe your customer’s life views about topics ranging from politics to religion.
Lifestyles are your customer’s choices about their living environment. Are they young, hip, risk-takers? Or are they cautious, conservative, retirees?
Behaviors include choices your customers make about the way they live their lives. Are they vegetarians? Do they recycle? Do they go to church every Sunday?
Life Stage describes where your customers are in their lives. Are they retired? Graduating from college? Making babies? (Let’s give a round of applause to all the people making babies.)
Life Event describes the specific events happening in your customer’s lives. 25th Wedding Anniversary? Birthday? Moving? Job change? The list goes on.

By taking a deeper dive into the attitudes, lifestyles, behaviors, life stages and life events of your prospects and customers, you’re able to provide them even more relevant marketing messages. And the more relevant your message, the better the results (or ROI).

Action Steps for You

Here are some things you can do to put this knowledge into action:

Go through the list and create three different customer personas based on the attributes listed above. Most people stop at one, but I’d like you to go a little deeper and create three customer personas
Now, do the same thing with your prospects — create three different personas based on your prospects’ attributes
Finally, analyze how your marketing campaigns match up with the six personas created above. Is it a good fit? Or a mis-match? Where can you make adjustments so that your marketing campaigns match your prospects and customers better?

If the tips mentioned above have your attention, you might also enjoy 5 Consumer Behavior Secrets You Can Use to Grow Your Sales and Revenue on the 60 Second Marketer blog. It takes a deeper dive into 5 aspects of consumer behavior that you can leverage for your business.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Founder of the 60 Second Marketer and co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile.” He is also a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.