Are you regularly creating one-size-fits-all content? Ineffective audience targeting in your content marketing efforts can lead to a variety of issues. For starters, you’re likely just wasting resources producing content that doesn’t feel relevant to specific audiences. If that’s not bad enough, you’ll often see negative effects in search engine rankings due to low engagement. And for those visitors that do make it to your site, they’ll quickly recognize the irrelevance and head straight over to your competitors.
Research suggests that 71% of consumers expect brands to interact with them on a personal level, and if they don’t like their experience, 75% of them will look to other brands to meet their needs.
Segmenting your customers allows you to deliver relevant, personalized content. However, doing so is an uphill slog if you need to manually sort data to group perspectives across your brand’s niche and along the customer buying journey.
Customer segmentation tools can help automate the process, freeing your team up to focus on delivering compelling and engaging content targeted to the right audience. Learn what to look for when shopping for segmentation software and which products we find most useful for content marketing.
What Do Customer Segmentation Tools Do?
Customer segmentation software analyzes data to group your audience automatically according to specified metrics. These tools often harness data across multiple channels, though which ones and how many vary. The software uses the information to segment your audience, generally according to demographics, behaviors, psychographics, and — for B2B companies — firmographics.
When choosing software for your marketing team, consider whether the product:
- Aligns with your company and marketing goals
- Can collect customer data or connect to your existing customer data stores
- Allows customization of segmentation metrics
- Provides tracking and analysis
- Has a user-friendly interface
- Scales with your business needs
Make sure the software is dynamic and can generate easy-to-understand and shareable reports, graphs, and charts. You should also look for products that integrate with systems you already use.
Our Top 12 Customer Segmentation Tools for Better Targeting
One solution, no matter how advanced, rarely does everything you need, and this holds true for segmentation tools. Your needs differ at each stage of the content marketing process, so you may need to use more than one tool. However, each one should integrate with other systems to make your entire content operations run efficiently.
We’ve sorted products according to their best uses to help you determine the most effective ones for your team.
Best Tools for Tailoring to Your Strategy
Content strategies are more successful when they target specific audiences. Your team can tailor content to match relevant characteristics and behaviors for prospects and customers with products that allow you to establish the criteria you are looking for.
Our top three customer segmentation tools that help you tailor your strategies are:
- Segment: Twilio’s Segment is a powerful tool for enterprise marketing and comm teams. It allows you to create personas and target audiences across touchpoints and in real-time.
- Qualtrics: With this product, you can create surveys or analyze phone call data to aid in segmentation. You can also create rules for segments based on customer experience and behavioral data.
- Kissmetrics: This marketing tool provides segmentation features based on app or website visitor behaviors. There are extra segmentation benefits for eCommerce businesses, such as insight into customer spending habits.
Your industry, business size, and content goals all shape your segmentation needs and strategies. Each tool has different strengths, so one may serve your purposes better than the others.
Image Source: AgencySparks
Best Customer Segmentation Tools for Content Planning
After you segment your audience, you need a way to plan content for each segment and content category. A standard planning calendar won’t cut it when you deal with mountains of assets across multiple channels and audience segments. These three tools allow you to develop a content plan that is aligned with your content strategy:
- MarketMuse: A lot of audience-related insights can be gleaned by analyzing past content performance and using that data to inform your future content plan. That’s MarketMuse in a nutshell.
- DivvyHQ: Combining our platform’s metadata management, content calendar, and reporting tools provides a simple yet powerful way to plan and schedule content based on audience segments and customer journey stages.
- SproutSocial: The frequency of social media planning and scheduling requires a dedicated set of tools like the ones you find on SproutSocial. This software lets you schedule multiple posts across platforms and profiles.
Using customer segmentation tools for social media and content planning and scheduling helps your team stay organized and efficient.
Top Choices for Segmented Asset Delivery
Make sure your content gets in front of the right audience with segmented asset delivery, whether via landing pages, social media, or emails. Here are three popular options:
- Salesforce: This CRM software has numerous features that provide for easy content delivery to segmented audiences.
- Facebook Ads (B2C), LinkedIn Ads (B2b): Depending on the nature of your market, Facebook and LinkedIn lead the pack when it comes to audience targeting tools for paid ads.
- MailChimp: As far as email marketing platforms go, Mailchimp is the industry leader, with segmentation, behavioral targeting, and predicted demographics tools to fine-tune email deliveries.
Targeted asset delivery is vital to implementing your content strategy. Customer segmentation tools are a critical feature for efficient automated asset delivery.
Best Products for Analyzing Performance Across Segments
You’ll want to analyze content performance across audience segments. Using tools like these to fine-tune your analyses and reports helps your team determine what works and what doesn’t.
- Google Analytics: The search engine giant also happens to offer robust analytics tools that let you capture data about content performance, drilled down to audience segments.
- DivvyHQ: Our platform incorporates rich metadata, including audience segmentation, allowing you to generate performance reports based on that information.
- Clearbit: This B2B-focused software can perform data analysis based on business-specific metrics, such as industry and size.
With the performance data in hand, you can adjust your audience segments and strategies based on outcomes.
Image Source: Google Analytics
How Does Divvy Include Integrations for Customer Segmentation Tools?
Divvy has numerous native integrations and an Open API that allows you to pull unique content strategy data into any customer segmentation tools your team needs to work efficiently. Incorporating the tools you use into one platform simplifies and streamlines your content marketing process.
Our robust calendar architecture ensures even the largest content marketing and comms teams are always in the know. Request a demo to discover chaos-free content marketing.
