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[Beginner – 103] How Does Content Segmentation Work?

All You Need to Know About Market Segmentation Strategy

If you’re a small business owner or burgeoning establishment, chances are you’ve spent some time making sure your
website and blog are up-to-date and in line with all of the traditional marketing guidelines. It’s likely that you’re writing
great content, that you’re using social media, that you’re adding videos and images as you should be, and perhaps that
you’ve even started paying to advertise your blog posts or are being paid for advertising space on yours. As such, you
might groan a bit when you hear what we’re going to tell you next: if you’re not utilizing market segmentation, you’re not
doing enough.

If you haven’t even heard of the term market segmentation, let alone know what it could possibly mean in relation to your
business, don’t worry; it’s about to be explained. Here’s what you need to know about market segmentation:

What is Market Segmentation Strategy?

Market segmentation refers to the process of dividing up your market into a variety of segments, or groups, and then
targeting your marketing efforts for each specific group. For example, if you’re a business that offers products for men,
women, and children, you wouldn’t just advertise to your general market, or “people”; rather, you’d advertise each of your
products to each target group—men, women, and children.

Why Segment a Market?

The reasons for segmenting a market are pretty straightforward—by utilizing market segmentation strategy, or dividing
your market up into specific and distinct groups—you can design and implement strategies that are specifically targeted at
each group. Therefore, you’ll be more effective in differentiating your brand from competitors, attracting your target
audiences, converting leads to sales, retaining customers, and improving the overall success of your content marketing
campaign.

What is Content Segmentation?

Content segmentation also referred to for our purposes as content personalization, is a huge part of market segmentation.
After you have segmented your market, then website content segmentation is the process of writing, designing, and
organizing content for each of your website’s segmented groups of visitors. Essentially, content segmentation allows you to
target different content to different types of people based on their behavior or other factors.

Depending on your personal preferences and type of business, you can segment your market and your content based on
a variety of different strategies. Common variables used for segmentation include:

Psychographic information, such as a groups’ interests, personalities, values, attitudes, common activities, lifestyle, etc.;

Geographical information, such as where a group of people lives, ranging in scope from country to neighborhood;

Demographic information, or things such as income, age, race, occupation, family size, religion, language, culture, gender,
etc.; and

Behavioral information, such as what the customers’ needs are and how they react to those needs in regard to a product
or service (if the customers are loyal to certain products, if they prefer more cost-effective options, what circumstances
contribute to a purchase happening, etc.) and why they’re visiting your site (For information? To make a purchase? To
apply for a job?).

Essentially, you want to find out who your audience is and what your audience does. After that, you can start to target your
content to each individual audience segment.

How Content Segmentation Works?

Once you know who makes up each one of your market segments, targeting content to them should be the easiest part.
One easy way to segment your content is by allowing visitors to your page to self-select, or to click on the section of your
website that best suits their needs. For instance, take the example given before about the company that sells products for
men, women, and children—in order to target to each group both individually and effectively, all a business owner needs to
do is to have three separate headings—one for men, one for women, and one for children—at the top of the business’s
homepage that are linked to pages with separate content for each group.

Once a user clicks the heading, they will be redirected to a page that is designed with their specific needs in mind. Voila—
basic content segmentation achieved!

However, your job’s not over quite yet. Once you get a user to his or her specific page, you must make sure that that page
is as effective as it possibly can be for the segment of your market that you’re trying to target. As such, make sure you share
videos that are aligned with your segments’ personal values, needs, or ideas; use quotes, case studies, testimonials, or
images that are placed with your audience in mind; write content that is relevant to that specific group; keep your website
and pages simple and easy to navigate; and use content that’s interactive to keep your audience returning to your site
again and again.

Proof that Market Segmentation Works

Market segmentation and content segmentation, or personalizing content for a specific audience, is paramount in
expanding your business and increasing engagement and sales. In fact, a recent survey published by Adobe and
Econsultancy found that 52 percent of digital marketers think that the ability to personalize web content to a specific market
is fundamental to their online strategy.

Another great example of the effectiveness of content segmentation and market segmentation strategy is taken from a
behavioral targeting campaign, implemented in hopes of increasing job applications from, conducted by the company
Visual Website Optimizer. Wanting to increase job applications from the website’s homepage in India, the company
inserted a tiny banner on the right-hand side of the page which read “We’re hiring in Delhi :).” Half of the site visitors for
India were shown the banner; the other half from India was not. The results were thus: there was a 149 percent increase in
CTR (click-through rate) from the homepage to the careers page. Point of the story: by using market segmentation strategy
by providing a banner that a target audience (those seeking a job with the company) could click, which then directed them
to a page that was targeted to their needs, the company was successful in its goal.

In conclusion, if you want to differentiate your brand, improve your content marketing, up the level of customer
engagement, and provide the best possible experience to those who visit your site, market segmentation strategy, and
content personalization, are key.

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