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How do you segment your market?

Clients ask us all the time to help them with the right characteristics for personas–which are essentially market segments. We use what we call the A2G framework to help you think through all the characteristics that might be helpful:

  • Attitudes: What are the visitor’s psychographics? Sometimes called attitudes, these characteristics include Personality, Values, Interests, Lifestyles, Purpose, Feelings, and more.
  • Behaviors: What did the visitor do? These actions include search keywords , the timing of the visit, other sites they have visited in the past, behavior within the session, purchase history, lifetime value, and more.
  • Completion: Did the visitor complete a task? This includes conversions, but also completion of other tasks, such as paying a bill, registering for an event, and many others.
  • Demographics: Who is the visitor? These characteristics include age, gender, income level, and lots more.
  • Entry: How did the visitor find your site or app? Did they come from Google, social media, an email, and ad, or a link from another site?
  • Firmographics: What organization are they from? The organizations’s characteristics include the industry, company size, and more.
  • Geographics: Where are they from? This can be a country, or much more specific, even down to a block within a town.

We focus mainly on these characteristics to target marketing messages, but they are also highly valuable for segmenting your analytics. Each time you run an A/B test, or look at your analytics, you can look at the results in aggregate, but sometimes it can be very helpful to break things down by these segmentation characteristics. Maybe your test “failed,” but it might be helpful to know that it failed miserably among men but actually worked for women.  If you can’t personalize your approach to show something different to men than women, this information might still help you to decide what to try next.

If you aren’t segmenting your numbers, you are missing a key means of insight into your test results and other analytics.

Mike Moran

Mike Moran is a Converseon, an AI powered consumer intelligence technology and consulting firm. He is also a senior strategist for SoloSegment, a marketing automation software solutions and services firm. Mike also served as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO. Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. Mike held various roles in his IBM career, including eight years at IBM’s customer-facing website, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where he led 65 information architects, web designers, webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world. Mike's newest book is Outside-In Marketing with world-renowned author James Mathewson. He is co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), now in its Third Edition. Mike is also the author of the acclaimed internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald. Mike founded and writes for Biznology® and writes regularly for other blogs. In addition to Mike’s broad technical background, he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing and is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He also teaches at Rutgers Business School. He was a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research and is now a Senior Fellow of The Conference Board. A Certified Speaking Professional, Mike regularly makes speaking appearances. Mike’s previous appearances include keynote speaking appearances worldwide

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