Segmentation: now everybody's doing it, you can't afford not to

Facebook’s new Groups facility means it’s no longer just marketers who’ll be segmenting their audiences. Facebook users can now create niches within their circles of friends, and share relevant status updates, information and documents (and chat) within these.

For example, a user can set up one group for work colleagues and one for her close group of buddies. She wouldn’t want the photos of last Friday’s big night out visible to the former, and instead she can share them just with her ‘close buddies’ group.

By segmenting friends according to the interests they have in common, her interactions with them become more appropriate, relevant and valuable. And she controls the types and frequency of notifications that she gets from the groups she is a member of.

Spray and pray is over

What should marketers learn from this? Well, if 500+ million Facebook users can learn how to segment their friends effectively, marketers are going to have to do the same. There is really no excuse for scattergun marketing anymore. People don’t want information that they don’t have an interest in – regardless of the channel.

Think about how many friends’ updates you have hidden from your Facebook news feed, or who you’ve unfriended. Why did you do it? Probably because that friend posts information too often that’s annoying or banal. It wasn’t interesting or relevant. Farmville, anyone?

Three keys to successful segmentation

For marketers, then, relevance is vital, and this has three elements: content, frequency and timing:

• Content must be tailored to each audience segment. By gathering as much information about your customers as possible, you can tailor your communications to fit their profiles. Adding recommendations to promote cross-selling is important too – but base these on the buying histories and behaviours of similar segments for maximum effect.

• If you’re issuing messages too often, you’re annoying. Give customers the option to receive your communications daily, weekly, monthly – or whenever they choose. That way, your messages will be welcome, not treated as spam. Just as your 250 friends don’t need a blow by blow report on your life, your customers don’t want to be bombarded with your brand messages daily.

• Timing is everything. You might tell a customer ten times about your new product, but until they are ready to buy it, they’re not going to respond. Split your audience according to where they are in the buying cycle and then send tailored messages that relate to this.

Worth the effort

Segmentation does not need to be time consuming or difficult. There are many tools out there that will help you to do this, using information that your customers already give you freely.

Control is now in the hands of your audience. Which information they broadcast and receive, how often, on what platform – they determine this, not you. As well as segmenting your audience and giving them relevant content, you need to provide as many options and choices to your audience as to how they receive these messages.

While this might seem like hard work, it need not be. With a little extra effort, your brand will soon have audiences who are much, much more receptive and more likely to convert.