Personalization in marketing is a must these days if you wish to build a relationship with your target audience and remain relevant to them, so they stay loyal to you. It is mainly a question of how you wish to segment. One option is to segment and personalize in relation to a particular industry.
What Is Segmentation?
Segmentation can be defined as breaking down your target audience into subsections or smaller groups in order to refine your marketing messaging. You can segment by product, service or industry to create different consumer sets in order to create a more customized experience. If you are email marketing, chances are you have probably segmented your lists into customers and prospects, for example.
What Is Personalization?
Personalization is a marketing strategy in which a business tries to deliver individualized content and product suggestions to a target audience, usually focused around a particular niche or industry. Personalization requires segmentation, data, analysis of that data, and some form of automation in order to match the right content to the right person.
Refining Your Messaging
Segmentation and personalization go hand in hand to help drill down and target the right people for your marketing messages, and in turn, to give them marketing messages they can really use. It is in many ways the opposite of broadcast marketing, such as ads on TV. A person might see a million ads for GEICO car insurance, for example, but if they don’t drive, there is no way that ad is ever going to stimulate a sale.
This is particularly true of certain industries. Each industry has its own special demands and needs. Segmentation and personalization can convey the impression that you really understand the concerns of the people in that industry and have your finger on the pulse of what’s in high demand. This can lead to better relationship building, which can translate into increased customer loyalty and sales.
Industry-Based Content
Once you have started to segment and personalize, you can begin to deliver exactly what your target customer wants and needs. You can refine your email marketing. You can also use a content personalization engine that will deliver the kind of content your site visitors want thanks to a small snippet of code you will install.
You can also create retargeting campaigns to give yourself more chances of selling a particular product to a person who visited that product page. If you’ve ever noticed products “following you” from site to site as you work on the internet, you will understand the potential power of retargeting.
Two of the top five industries in the US are health and finance. Both are worth around $1.25 trillion dollars each year. Each of these industries has their own needs. Focusing on one is a great deal more productive than trying to market to both. Specialization can lead to better segmentation. You will be able to research the industry in order to drill down to what certain segments want and need.
For example, within health there is Western medicine and also complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). CAM is worth more than $30 billion per year in the US alone. CAM can refer to healing modalities such as acupuncture or aromatherapy, which you could segment for, or herbs and supplements – an extremely profitable part of the industry. For herbs and supplements, there are four main segments:
* Ayurvedic medicine from India
* Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)
* European herbalism
* Native American herbalism
Focusing on one would still give you plenty of work to do and many opportunities to sell to your target market.
Segmentation and personalization can help you grab a percentage of the revenue in a particular industry because you are not trying to be all things to all people, but rather, knowing what your target audience wants and delivering it.
