After you have created your desired segments using demographic data and other areas of importance like geodemographics, behavioural and psychographic, it’s time to use your segments. By merging the consumer intelligence you’ve derived with more tangible data like postcode insights, it’s time to use your segments.

Step One: Assign a value to your segments

Now that you have created segments related to target audiences, you can actually value them. Not all segments should have equal weight. There are more opportunities within certain segments. The 80/20 rule of the Pareto Principle is the general consensus that 80 percent of business’sales come from 20 percent of their customers.  With this in mind, you can identify that 20 percent and classify them as high-value segments. This can help you realign your marketing strategies to prioritise these groups and better meet their needs.

Step Two: Focus your efforts

Now that you know the value of each segment, you can focus on the most important ones. This may mean you need to change the channels, messages or overall offerings of your brand. Focusing should reduce the waste in your marketing spend. Because you have a clear audience profile, you’ll know where your audience is and can get relevant offers in front of them.

Step Three: Prioritise segments

With consumer classification and segmentation, you can see which groups are most profitable to your business. You’ll be able to further track these groups to understand the volume and value of their purchases. Use this data to look at your marketing expenditure. Does it make sense? Prioritising in this manner should provide you the ability to rank segments and the investment in each.

Step Four: Improve your offerings, products or services

Segmentation delivers the key information you need to know exactly who is buying your products and services. You know what they like, so make it even better. The most important changes or improvements that brands make are many times because of the customer feedback or buyer behaviours. For example, if you collected data on the way in which a segment of customers use your software platform, you’d be able to enhance it to better meet their needs.

Being in touch with your customers’ preferences can also provide you with a competitive advantage and build further customer loyalty and satisfaction. Because you know your segment so well and have given preferential treatment to certain segments, you should also be able to draw conclusions on the evolution of their needs.

Step Five: Share the knowledge

The knowledge that a sales and marketing team have about customers or target audiences can be shared with other departments. Providing key insights can help you build a better customer support team wherein they have the information needed to anticipate customer needs. It can also be used in other areas such as operations (knowing what product to market at certain times) or can be referenced by your research and development team.

Ready to start using your segments?

You may already have demographic data related to your customers, like buying behaviours and basic information. Adding to this data, however, could provide more insights and actionable paths. At DoordaStats, we provide access to the greatest breadth and freshest selection of geo-demographic data. We emphasize the freshness factor because data is only as good as it is accurate. By using our sources, you no longer have to wear a data scientist hat. You can take our data and add it to what existing data you may have. This will allow you to segment better in less time.