Audience Segmentation in Digital Publishing
Written by Matt Berringer
January 20, 2022
Profitable long-term customer relationships form when a well-planned campaign meets the ideal audience. Without a doubt, the road to monetization is much shorter with audience segmentation. Although marketing companies regularly use this technique to find the perfect audience for an ad campaign, it can be equally helpful to publishers.
Audience segmentation allows digital publishers to target specific readers for different publications or ads. Let’s take a closer look at what audience segmentation is, its major benefits and how your company can begin implementing this powerful marketing tactic.
What Is Audience Segmentation?
Audience segmentation is the process of taking your customers and dividing them into smaller groups according to specific categories. Some types of audience segmentation in digital marketing include:
- Demographics: This type of segmentation sorts your audience by age, geographic location, gender, family size, occupation and ethnicity.
- Behavior: Behavioral characteristics can include buying habits, brand loyalty, browsing history and website bounce rates.
- Psychographics: This classification method groups customers based on their interests, beliefs, motivations and hobbies.
By analyzing data from your customers and segmenting them into smaller groups, you can design advertising campaigns specific to each type of customer. Customer segmentation helps your publishing company create more powerful and meaningful content, identify unique opportunities for your publications and attract new customers.
How Does It Work?
Audience segmentation works by allowing companies to connect with specific groups of their customer base. Your audience consists of individuals with unique needs, aspirations and lifestyles. By using audience segmentation tools like cookies and Google Analytics, you can analyze customer data and browsing histories to better understand the different ways each individual consumes your content. These two tools work in conjunction to provide you with information about a user’s web browser and individual website sessions.
For some audience segmentation examples, let’s examine the following situation. Suppose your digital publishing company has two publications with affiliated websites. Although both publications are about food and cooking, one magazine focuses on healthy diets and foods that promote fitness while the other is about gourmet recipes, wines and restaurants.
With audience segmentation, you may discover that 80% of your audience consists of health-conscious individuals, while only 20% are interested in gourmet food. This information allows you to organize your marketing efforts and promote the right magazines to the correct groups. You can also adjust your spending now that you know most of your readers are interested in the fitness-centered magazine.
Why Is Audience Segmentation Important?
With audience segmentation, you can identify a target group and tailor an advertising campaign to fit their specific needs.
Other benefits of audience segmentation include:
- Understanding your customers: You can provide your audience with a better experience because you’ll understand their needs, motivations and goals.
- Implementing effective marketing: By understanding your audience better, you can choose the most effective marketing techniques.
- Developing new products: Identifying different customer groups might help you discover that you’re missing out on unique selling opportunities.
Get the Most Out of Your Marketing
Audience segmentation can help you use effective marketing techniques to grow your digital publishing company. At Nxtbook Media, we provide digital publishing companies with exceptional content to improve customer experience and increase website engagement. Get in touch with our team to schedule a demo today.