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Consumer segmentation

Consumer segmentation groups customers or prospects based on shared traits such as gender, location and past purchases so you can delight your customers with every interaction. Compelling, customer-centric marketing messages start with well executed customer segmentation.

What is consumer segmentation?

You can segment consumer audiences using demographics, geographic location, consumer behavior, psychographics, social media habits, life-stage, transactional patterns, and more. But what does that look like for you?

Let’s say you’re a marketer at a sporting goods and outdoor equipment store. Your brand wants to increase sales at a specific store location. To accomplish this goal, you’ve decided to create a localized campaign to reach people most likely to spend at that store. The first step is segmenting your audience for the campaign. You want to reach a target audience who:

  • Works from home
  • Lives within 15 miles of the selected store location
  • Enjoys camping as a travel activity
  • Spends over $1,000 on travel each year 
  • Frequently buys from pet and outdoor specialty stores
  • Engages with digital display marketing channels
  • Buys in-store more than they do online  

With this customer in mind, you can produce a campaign that emphasizes the benefits of getting away from a home office, packing up a cat or dog, and spending time in the great outdoors. Across channels, Experian can help you deliver the campaign to your target audience and measure its effectiveness on sales at the store level.

Consumer Segmentation Visual

7 types of consumer segmentation

You can target narrow or national audiences to meet your marketing goals by using our industry-leading and privacy-forward consumer data. Instead of marketing to an entire population, focus your marketing efforts and resources targeting consumers most likely to buy your product or service.

Demographic segmentation

Demographic

Personalize your marketing messages using demographic segmentation. You can divide your target market based on variables like:

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Education level
  • Ethnicity
  • Nationality
  • Occupation
  • Social status

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic

Geographic segmentation lets you reach people within specific regions. You can segment your marketing messages based on where people live, where they shop, and more, allowing you to allocate marketing resources to meet your business goals.

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral

Behavioral segmentation gives you a better understanding of consumer purchasing decisions and what drives them to choose one brand over another. Target consumers based on how, when, and why they spend their money.

There are six subcategories of behavioral segmentation:

  • Occasion purchasing
  • Customer usage
  • Loyalty gauge
  • Buying usage
  • Purchasing behavior
  • Product/service benefits

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic

Psychographic segmentation allows you to refine and divide your target audience based on their buying behaviors. This includes the values, lifestyle types, activities, opinions, and beliefs that compel your target market to make a purchase. Psychographic segmentation focuses on using qualitative data to build a complex customer profile that help you build campaigns that resonate with your audience.

Social Media Segmentation

Social Media

Social media segmentation utilizes ConsumerView data from social media platforms to segment an audience. It uses social media profiles, posts, and engagements to build personas so you can generate a marketing strategy that engages with your target market.

Life-Stage Segmentation

Life-Stage

Businesses can use life-stage segmentation to divide their target market into age groups and create customized sales strategies for each specific sector. It helps enterprises understand the needs and wants of each life-stage group so they can develop a marketing approach for people based on where they are at in life, such as newlyweds vs. empty nesters.

Transactional Segmentation

Transactional

With transactional segmentation, you can divide your prospects based on spending patterns. This type of market segmentation splits your target audience into categories according to how recently they did business with your brand, purchase-based data, and the amount of money spent.

How Experian can help you with consumer segmentation

Elevate your marketing with insights about your target audience. Being able to identify your customers is the first step to data-driven advertising.

 

Every day, Experian is empowering brands to use insights to enable meaningful interactions, with data-driven consumer segmentation. As leaders in the evolving advertising landscape, we help you:

  • Identify new customer groups
  • Uncover your most effective communication channels
  • Measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities and campaigns
  • Improve brand engagement
  • Enhance customer loyalty

Surprise and delight with consumer segmentation

Consumers want to build relationships with brands that recognize and deliver what they need. As a marketer, you can create lasting impressions with messaging that speaks to consumers, not at them. These data-driven consumer segmentation strategies go beyond basic demographics to enable deeper, more effective communication. It’s a win-win.

We can help you with your customer segmentation initiatives. Check out our consumer segmentation solution or connect with us to learn more.