How Brands Are Leveraging Market Segmentation To Acquire Customers
Reading Time: 4 minutesOver the span of a few years, brands have been overly focused on performance marketing. While it is understandable, given that the results are immediate, it is not the sole element of the story. Most brands employ the same purchase channels, and are swamping the market with universal promotions creating a lot of noise. As a result, buyers are tuning out, and now performance marketing is not performing as well as it did. On the other hand, brands are leveraging market segmentation.
This is because, the results of brand marketing have been hard to measure. And since brands have had a harder time quantifying its value, they have “underinvested” in it. In order to create a significant connection with consumers as well as drive long-term retention, leading brands are rooting performance marketing in brand marketing.
So the one technique that they have adopted is identity marketing. It is an approach where you align your brand marketing with the identity of your core buyer and deliver a personalized promotion or campaign just to that specific consumer group such as nurses, teachers, first responders, students, etc.
Reasons To Embrace Market Segmentation
Identity-based marketing is a smart way to contribute less on acquisitions and get more conversions. There are many reasons why brands must embrace this approach, such as:
Improves Segmentation And Targeting
Every style of marketing messaging should be crafted and designed by keeping a specific target audience in mind. When you design customer identities, you are able to segment your customers into groups. These groups will put together like-minded people who exhibit having similar behaviors, interests, as well as characteristics. Your targets will influence the way you create these segments, which will always improve over time because your customers’ behavior evolves as you collect more data points.
Creates A Consistent Customer Experience
Your customers will appreciate you when you are able to create a customer journey that is consistent as well as personalized. And in order to have a consistent customer journey, you need to leverage the customer data that you already own.
Formulating a customer journey that is consistent, means you need to make sure you put your predictable hat on. This is because your customers will expect their next interaction with you to be well acquainted with their previous interaction. For instance, clicking on a CTA saying “sign up for free” should not take them to a page that asks for payment!
Consistency in your marketing should reach beyond a CTA. It should cover every touchpoint you have with your customers. This means ensuring that every message, promotion, or advertising consistently reflects your customer’s identity aligning with your brand identity.
Enhances Personalization
Perhaps one of the most difficult things in marketing is providing a personalized experience for each customer. However, with identity marketing, you have the customer data at your fingertips. As a result, you have the opportunity to improve on personalizing your customer’s experience with your marketing initiatives. Many organizations have yet to accomplish a system to efficiently collect customer data, but those who have, they are way ahead of their competition in terms of providing a more valuable and personal customer experience.
Personalization is about using your customer data and grouping customers with similar characteristics and behaviors to provide them with marketing messages that cater to their customer identity.
How Should Brands Drive Identity Marketing
There are several key criteria that brands should use when launching an identity marketing program. Such as:
Identity Marketing Program Management
Since brands are leveraging identity marketing, they should select a platform that enables them to easily create, test, go-live, as well as optimize their identity marketing program. As a marketer, you should create your own program. Select the consumer tribe you want to focus on, produce the right copy for the offer, and pick the type of coupon you want to deliver – all within your own brand experience.
Instant Verification Coverage
The identity marketing program needs to authenticate whether users are eligible for the offer or not. When implemented successfully, your brand experience will be embedded with very little friction and instant verification. To achieve that, search for a vendor that supports all the consumer tribes. Finalize the one that would be of interest to your brand and have the highest instant verification coverage for that tribe.
Be careful of solutions that require your users to go to a different site to create an account. This will only result in a significant drop-off in your conversion rate.
Offer Protection
Defend your identity-based programs from discount abuse and revenue leakage. Use a variety of advanced fraud prevention techniques like digital fingerprinting, same person limits, and image manipulation.
Analytics & Optimization
Make sure you can easily examine the effectiveness of your identity marketing program with verification analytics and conversion metrics. Optimize your conversion with re-engagement, conversion tracking, and A/B testing.
Final Words
Brands are leveraging identity marketing, which is a relatively new customer acquisition and retention strategy. It is converting into a component of a brand’s personalization strategy. Brands are integrating it into their loyalty program to develop a deeper understanding of their buyers as well as to build an emotional connection that results in increased engagement, transaction, and repeats business.
Once you have discovered the way you are going to collect customer data, you will have an infrastructure that is essential to run identity-driven marketing initiatives. As you begin to run campaigns that are more personalized and customized, you will start increasing customer data points that help in improving your customer experience.
FAQs:
1. What is Identity Marketing?
Identity marketing is an approach where you align your brand marketing with the identity of your core buyer and deliver a personalized promotion or campaign just to that specific consumer group such as nurses, teachers, first responders, students, etc.
2. What are the reasons to adopt identity marketing?
- It improves segmentation and targeting.
- It creates a consistent customer experience.
- Identity marketing helps to improve on personalizing a customer’s experience with marketing initiatives.
3. How should brands drive identity marketing?
- Since brands are leveraging identity marketing, they should select a platform that enables them to easily create, test, go-live, as well as optimize their identity marketing program.
- This program needs to authenticate whether users are eligible for the offer or not. To achieve that, search for a vendor that supports all the consumer tribes. Finalize the one that would be of interest to your brand and have the highest instant verification coverage for that tribe.
- Defend your identity-based programs from discount abuse and revenue leakage. Use a variety of advanced fraud prevention techniques like digital fingerprinting, same person limits, and image manipulation.
- Make sure you can easily examine the effectiveness of your marketing program with verification analytics and conversion metrics. Optimize your conversion with re-engagement, conversion tracking, and A/B testing.
