Published 14 Dec, 2020 6 minutes of reading
If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that you can get almost anything done online. As of October 2020, there are 4.6 billion people actively using the internet for everything from watching TV shows and paying the bills to even going to school. Across the board, the digital space and attention economy are becoming more competitive, and you want your business to stand out.
In doing that, you've likely worked hard to publish quality content for your users. But ask yourself: is each piece you’ve created relevant to every single one of your users? Is each customer going to be interested in every product or service that you offer? Given your diverse set products and services, the answer is probably not.
Audience Segmentation
No matter the industry, large businesses that take the time to create unique content for different customers are able to engage a variety of audiences with said content. This is when audience segmentation comes into play. You can segment your audiences in many ways, and generally, you can break your segmentation down into four categories:
This segmentation allows you to target campaigns and articles based on users' demographics and interests, ultimately improving their customer experience.
Two-thirds of companies now compete on customer experience (compared to a meager 36% in 2010) and 84% of companies see an increase in revenue when they work on improving their customer experience. Needless to say, it’s important, and will probably continue to gain priority for the foreseeable future.
How to segment your audience in Modyo (spoiler alert: with Targets)
Creating Targets may seem like a complex or time-consuming process, but using Modyo, targeting is a simple way to handle users in bulk that can be done in just a few minutes. By filtering your audiences and creating targets in Modyo, you can identify and focus on certain audience segments. You can then deliver specific content in your sites based on your customers' profiles, personalizing the experiences of millions of people.
This segmentation takes into account the aspects already mentioned (demographic, geographic, behavioral and psychographic), but can also incorporate customized filters that are only related to your business and integrate with your systems and databases. With this targeting framework in mind, let’s look in more detail at how we can focus messages on audiences using these categories.
Using targets in Modyo
When targeting users within your audience by demographic, you are using information that you know about them in order to orient your content accordingly. This information tends to be attributes about your users such as their age, occupation, location, and other statistics.
Let’s say you have a new post about all of the benefits of your bank, but you only want adults over 18 years to see this content. In this case you will be targeting your audience by demographic, that is, their age. The steps to do this within Modyo are straightforward:
1. In Customers, select Targets, then create a segment by clicking New Target.
2. Select Users who match or Users who do not match. Then, choose what you want to filter: there are many options including birth date, login device, activation status, etc. Choose Age and select Greater than and then input the number value 17.
Notice at the bottom you can see how many people match the filter. This can be an opportunity to see how many people you will actually be reaching, and if you’d like, you can play around with the filters to see if a different combination will create a larger audience.
3. Then, click Next to name your New target. For example, Clients 18 Years and Up. Then click Save.
4. Next, to post an article specifically for this group, go to Content and then Spaces.Then, you will either create a New Entry, or edit an existing one. If you are creating a New Entry, click + New Entry.
5. Type the Name and Identifier of your post and click create. Then, in order to target a piece of content, choose the option to make this piece private, and then click Enable targeting. Then, choose the target you previously created, Clients 18 and Up. Now, only your users who are 18 and over will be able to see this content.
Perhaps for your users under 18, you could include a post about the exclusive benefits for students. You would then follow the same process, but instead add an additional filter that helps us target based on the student group.
Now, instead of positioning potentially irrelevant information in front of a particular audience—content that could likely cause them to leave or ignore the content entirely—you are providing your users with information more relevant to their interests.
Targeting by Geographics (also known as geo-tagging)
In the same way that we have seen for the demographic type target, in Modyo we can also apply geographic type filters. Geographics allow you to segment groups depending on their location, such as country, region or city. This is crucial, especially as people continue to rely more and more on their mobile devices, and thus access your site from many different locations. Would you want to appear in the search results of a user hundreds of miles away if you’re not an online business?
Let’s look at a concrete example. Your university has two campus locations, one in Los Angeles for undergraduates and the other in San Diego for medical students. They will be doing construction on one of the parking structures for two weeks on the LA campus and you want to let the students know. You can easily do this using a geographic target. However, what happens if the med student from the San Diego location happens to go to the LA campus? If you’ve created a geolocation filter, students at the San Diego location who happen to be in LA that week will also be notified.
Messaging and behavioral targeting
Actions tend to speak louder than words, and by using the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) Model, you can target your users’ actions based on their past data.
In Modyo, you can use the messaging feature to reach your target audience by emails or notifications. The email will be sent to the email address registered to the user profiles of the site, while the notification is through Modyo’s internal messaging system and will appear when the user enters the site.
In messaging campaigns, you can see and review all the messages that you have sent to your clients along with metrics including its reach, opens, and clicks. The messaging tool allows you to send relevant notifications, updates and newsletters to your users while also personalizing each message to better relate to and engage with your target audience. To continue with the parking structure example, imagine those undergraduates didn’t open the email you sent about the construction, and you want to make sure they see it. You can create this target by filtering out users who did not open the mail, and have a notification appear on the university's website when they log in, increasing the odds that they’ll see it.
To continue with the parking structure example, imagine those undergraduates didn’t open the email you sent about the construction, and you want to make sure they see it. You can create this target by filtering out users who did not open the mail, and have a notification appear on the university's website when they log in, increasing the odds that they’ll see it.
Targeting by Psychographics
Psychographic information can be your consumer’s hobbies, spending habits, likes and dislikes. It’s important to understand your buyers’ psychographics, along with the previously mentioned categories, to best target your audience. Through Forms, another one of Modyo's features, you can get to know your audience much better to then create filters related to much more relevant and targeted targets.
You can create a form that will appear once the user has accessed your site after a chosen amount of times, as to not initially bombard them with questions they may not feel comfortable to answer quite yet. However, after building trust and confidence in your company, they will likely be more than happy to answer the form, giving you better insight.
In summary, know your audience
All the features mentioned in this article serve to develop and improve the content strategy of your business and provide relevant and useful information that ultimately generates an economic return. This strategy involves getting to know your users and delivering what they need or are interested in. Make all actions related to the creation of your company's content meaningful and measurable. This is the only way to keep your users committed and satisfied with what you offer. At Modyo we know this is very important and that is why we make it easy and configurable in a matter of minutes. We want to help and .
Photo by Christian Battaglia on Unsplash
