It’s back-to-school season. Knowing your target audience is an essential piece of planning a successful back-to-school marketing campaign. To get the most out of your marketing investment this back-to-school season, it’s important to understand how to identify and segment back-to-school shoppers so you can make sure that the right message reaches the right group at the right time.
In this blog post, we’ll cover how you can segment your target audience to create and deliver custom messaging tailored to individual groups. We’ll discuss segmentation methods that uncover:
- Who they are
- Where they live
- What type of person they are
- How they behave and spend
Here are our tips to accurately define and target your back-to-school marketing audience.
Maximize back-to-school marketing with customer segmentation
Customer segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into smaller groups based on common characteristics such as demographics, behaviors, psychographics, geographics, and more. The purpose of customer segmentation is to create a more personalized and effective approach to marketing. By understanding the unique needs and preferences of each segment, you can tailor your messaging, campaigns, and content to resonate with your customers on a deeper level.
Benefits of customer segmentation
Three benefits of customer segmentation include:
- Improved audience targeting
- Higher engagement rates
- Increased ROI
Instead of addressing your entire customer base with generic messaging, segmentation enables you to deliver custom campaign messaging that speaks directly to each group. This personalized approach helps build trust and loyalty with your customers over time.
Customer segmentation also allows you to better understand your customers, their motivations, and pain points, ultimately leading to more effective marketing campaigns.
Types of customer segmentation
When it comes to segmenting your customers, there are several methods to consider. By experimenting with different approaches, you can find the best fit for your business. Keep in mind that the most effective customer segments will differ depending on the industry.
Let’s review four types of customer segmentation that you can implement as part of your back-to-school marketing strategy.
1. Demographic segmentation
Demographic segmentation categorizes consumers into groups based on shared demographic characteristics such as age, gender, income, occupation, marital status, and family size.
For example, targeting college students during the back-to-school season with promotions on laptops is likely to be more effective than targeting retirees who may have less interest in such products.
2. Behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation divides customers into groups based on their demonstrated behaviors. This method sorts customers by their knowledge of products or services, attitudes toward brands, likes/dislikes about offers, responses to promotions, purchasing tendencies, and usage of products/services.
Behavioral segmentation can help you identify the highest-spending customer segments, so you can budget and target more effectively. Through this type of segmentation, you can analyze each group’s patterns, discover trends, and plan informed marketing moves for the future.
In a back-to-school campaign, you could use behavioral segmentation to identify students who prefer to shop locally. You could then target students who value supporting local businesses and emphasize the importance of buying from local retailers during the back-to-school season.
3. Geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation involves dividing your target market into groups based on their physical locations. Geographic segmentation reveals aspects of a local market, including physical location, climate, culture, population density, and language.
In a back-to-school campaign, you could use geographic segmentation to identify target audiences in colder climates who may be more interested in winter clothing and gear. You could also use geographic segmentation to target students living in college towns with messaging that speaks directly to campus life.
4. Psychographic segmentation
Psychographic segmentation groups customers based on psychological factors such as lifestyle, interests, personality, and values.
In a back-to-school campaign, you could use psychographic segmentation to target students who value sustainable practices, promote eco-friendly products, or offer incentives for recycling and reusing items.
Watch our 2024 video for tips from industry leaders for back-to-school
In our new Q&A video with Experian experts, we explore changing consumer behaviors surrounding back-to-school shopping in 2024. In the video, we discuss:
- Anticipated shifts in consumer behaviors and shopping habits
- Tactics we predict marketers will employ to navigate signal loss
- Which channels will be the most successful
- And more!
Get in touch
Latest posts
by AdExchanger // Friday, March 15th, 2019 – 12:06 am “Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today's column is written by Preethy Vaidyanathan, chief product officer at Tapad, a part of Experian For years marketers asked, “How do we get more data?” Now that they've mastered data mining, marketers want to know what’s next. The time has come for organizations to make their abundance of digital data actionable, increase ROI and reach consumers with consistent, personalized experiences across all touchpoints. A seamless consumer experience can only be achieved by consolidating digital data. Organizations, however, are finding that consolidating data silos is more time-consuming and complicated than initially expected. The challenges One of the most pervasive obstacles companies face in when consolidating data is adopting inefficient and costly tactics that quickly become outdated. For instance, over the last couple of years, many companies turned to enterprise data warehouses to consolidate data silos, but some were too expensive or poorly suited for raw, unstructured and semi-structured data. This led companies to adopt data management initiatives, which bogged down many enterprises. Perception among senior level executives is another challenge. Many still question the need for digital transformation – achieving greater efficiencies through updating business and organizational processes with new technologies. Gartner found that more than half (54%) of senior executives say their digital business objective is transformational, while 46% say their objective is optimization. Digital transformation and data consolidation require time and effort. So, many large organizations work to overcome data silos as part of a multiyear digital transformation versus an immediate action item, delaying the benefits the company sees from taking on this project. All of these challenges make delaying progress in data consolidation easy, but companies should remember the impetus for doing so: creating a seamless customer experience that, in turn, drives business results. Brands with higher quality customer experience grow revenue faster than direct competitors with lower quality customer experience. The approach Many brands go into the digital transformation process assuming they have massive amounts of customer data, and that much of it is valuable or will be in the future. They might spend months aggregating that data in data stores or data lakes – at great expense. The trouble is that their data was scattered across multiple databases, which means it’s highly fragmented. As a result of this fragmentation, marketers can’t activate their data in ways that enhance the customer experience. To do so, companies must ensure their digital data is highly flexible so it can provide a holistic view of the consumer journey across every digital, in-store, in-venue and offline channel. I’d recommend that organizations taking on data centralization initiatives prioritize use cases that offer the company the greatest benefit. This is where organizations should establish a “crawl, walk, run” approach to data centralization to ensure key executives buy into the process. Starting with a subset of use cases, such as customer retention or upsell, or with a campaign, which is an even smaller starting point, allows executives to see the benefits of data consolidation projects relatively quickly. Once they validate these initial benefits, they can expand the range of use cases or campaigns, as well as the marketing ROI for their business. While data centralization is a long-term project that may take several years to complete, it doesn’t mean a business can’t get started now and see measurable results quickly. Break down data consolidation into stages so the organization can experience wins along the way. At the end of the day, data consolidation will help organizations deliver more effective marketing campaigns that drive business growth. Contact us today
Tapad's technology enhances Bidtellect clients frequency capping and audience extension capabilities cross device. NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian, is a global marketing technology company and leader in digital identity resolution solutions, today announced a new partnership with Bidtellect (now Simpli.fi), a leading native Demand-Side Platform (DSP). Bidtellect's paid content distribution platform will leverage The Tapad Graph™ as its first cross-device partner. The integration will offer Bidtellect's clients in the U.S. and Canada cross-device frequency capping and enhanced audience extension capabilities. The combination of Tapad's leading cross-device technology, with Bidtellect's unparalleled scale and optimization capabilities, will allow content marketers within brands and agencies to develop even more strategic, effective content marketing campaigns. The Tapad Graph™ will allow content marketers to gain greater reach and create more relevant, unified messaging with targeted delivery, when used in conjunction with Bidtellect's technology. Marketers can expect to benefit from amplified reach, and enhanced, privacy-safe engagement with desired audiences as a result of this partnership. "Partnering with Tapad, the leaders in cross-device data, provides Bidtellect with a complete solution that leverages both probabilistic and deterministic mapping strategies," said Mike Conway, Chief Technology Officer at Bidtellect. "The Tapad relationship expands our audience size by providing the opportunity to reach the same user across multiple devices and, when used in conjunction with our frequency capping functionality, ensures increased reach, reduced ad saturation, and elimination of wasted ad spend." As the partnership progresses, Tapad will also work with Bidtellect to provide advanced attribution for conversions and engagement metrics including connectivity and amplification. These advanced insights will help brands and agencies develop a more holistic approach to content marketing, so they can build audiences and influence bidding algorithms that directly impact their business. "We're thrilled to be working with Bidtellect as the company's first cross-device partner," said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. "At Tapad, we are continuously advancing our identity resolution solutions to keep pace with the ever-changing needs of marketers. As a part of that commitment, we look to work with partners where our technology is able to enhance their offering to better serve marketers. We are looking forward to creating that superior experience with the Bidtellect team." Contact us today
The Tapad Graph Now Offered in Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud New York, NY — August 7, 2018 — Tapad, now part of Experian, is advancing personalization for the modern marketer, announced today that its proprietary Tapad Graph is now integrated with Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, helping marketers expand their view of consumers and boost results through Tapad’s probabilistic solution. Tapad has been working closely with the Adobe Audience Manager team on this integration. With the Tapad Graph integration, customers based in the U.S. and Canada can use the Tapad Device Graph to expand the reach of audiences defined and activated in Adobe Audience Manager to extend first- and third-party data and deliver personalization across paid, earned and owned channels, publisher sites, programmatic, and more. Tapad worked closely with Adobe to develop the integration, allowing marketers to enable first-party data that has been previously tied to cookies and mobile. This offering has been beta-tested by leading organizations across retail, financial services, telecom providers, and more. “We're excited to publicly announce the solution our team has been closely designing over the past 12 months with Adobe,” said Chris Feo, SVP, Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. “This solution will give marketers in the U.S. and Canada the ability to unlock increased value from Adobe Audience Manager through the power of the Tapad Graph and its ability to expand customer prospects.” Tapad has repeatedly proven its ability to provide marketers with a unified view of the customer across channels and screens. With the Tapad Graph, a global identity graph that currently supports more than 100 enterprise customers and 200 integration partners, marketers can extend their reach and customize messages based on user and household-level data. Contact us today