Modern audience segmentation: five actionable steps for brands

The digital marketing landscape is changing. The age of traditional demographic targeting, whether based on generation, gender, or other broad generalisations, is coming to an end. In its place is modern audience segmentation, an approach rooted in understanding customers as real people with individual values, motivations, and needs. Earlier this year, we conducted a social experiment to challenge generational stereotypes, later summarised in a whitepaper report. The findings showed that age-based assumptions are an outdated way of categorising audiences, and one that could be costing brands dearly. Our VP of Strategy, Lydia Hinchliff, also explored this shift in a recent webinar, highlighting why modern audience segmentation requires brands to move beyond surface-level data and invest in deeper audience understanding. We followed up with Lydia to uncover five actionable steps brands can take to better identify and engage their audiences.

Get to know your customers as people, not demographics

Getting to know your customers as people rather than numbers, statistics, or stereotypes is crucial. Put the time and effort into speaking with the people browsing and buying your product or service to really understand them. Interview them (in store if you have a physical location) and focus group them to find out who is buying from you and who you should be targeting. Use this insight to inform an analysis of the four Ps—product, price, place, promotion—to understand how you can effectively reach this audience.

Find your audience’s universal values

In getting to know your customers on a more personal, granular level, you should seek to uncover and identify their universal values. What are their drivers, ambitions, and pain points? And how do these resonate across generations? Go beyond platforms and really focus on what matters most to your customers. Take a back-to-basics approach and think about what it is that keeps your audience coming back to your brand. What do they look for above all else and how is this likely to change in the future?

Understand the long-term trends shaping modern audiences

This brings us onto the next tip, which is all about long-term trends. It’s critical to understand the difference between fast and slow trends: the former cause huge spikes in interest, but tail off almost as quickly as they emerge, while the latter have often been in the making for decades. Think about the shift in beauty products in recent years, from how they make customers look to how they make customers feel. This is part of an increase in mindfulness, physical and mental awareness and wellbeing, and alternative belief systems, which are slow trends that have been in the making for decades. Products and brands in this market that have shifted their focus from extrinsic (what other people think of you) to intrinsic (what you think and feel about yourself) have positioned themselves in the best possible position to stay ahead. When analysing trends, think about the macro rather than the micro, and don’t look into trends across less than a three-year period. For anything shorter than this, think about what the underlying theme is that ties these sharper, fast trends together.

Take a wider, values-led approach

Time and time again, we see brands succeed by focusing on these longer-term trends and addressing concerns that span a broader range of people. Think about how you can diversify into multi-generational marketing, finding values and solving problems for everyone.  Taking that wider, values-based approach helps brands foster trust and grow into market leaders. Brands that experience immediate widespread popularity by chasing (or even setting) short-term trends and exclusively targeting younger audiences can see exponential growth, but the very nature of this approach means that the audience will soon move on to the next big trend.

Remember: you’re targeting people

The final thing to remember is that you’re targeting people, not demographics. As marketers, we spend far too much time trying to segment and group our audiences, rather than treating them as human beings with a wide variety of backgrounds, motivations, and personalities. Speak to your customers, as often as you can. Test things out to see what lands. In the same way that stand-up comedians host work-in-progress shows to develop new material, try out new approaches and observe the response from real people. Use all the insight you gather from this to find the values, behaviours, and needs that really matter to your audience.

Connect with the team

Inspired by these steps and ready to put modern audience segmentation into practice? Get in touch with us to start building deeper, more authentic audience connections.