It’s Marketing 101: If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one. Marketing messages are only effective when you’re directing them to the right people. That’s why one of your first priorities is to know your customer, and this is easier to do when you use audience segmentation tools.
Segmenting refers to separating your audience by shared characteristics. You can create focused marketing campaigns for each segment by appealing to their unique needs or characteristics.
For example, you might segment your email list into three buckets: New Sign-ups, Leads, and Paying Customers. Each of these segments is somewhere different in their journeys and will respond to different offers, messaging, and triggers.
Or you might segment customers based on interests, buying behaviors, or where they live. A campaign targeting housewives in New York who are interested in hair care and have recently bought a new blow dryer is a more focused campaign than, say, a generic message about hair products.
Finding these common denominators — and executing campaigns based on these shared factors — gives you a clear understanding of a diverse customer base.
Here’s how audience segmentation tools can make light work of personalized marketing and the top audience segmentation software to guide your next campaign.
Contents:
What Are Key Features of Audience Segmentation Tools?
The Top Audience Segmentation Tools
How Audience Segmentation Tools Drive Results
Getting Started with Meltwater’s Audience Segmentation Tool
What Are Key Features of Audience Segmentation Tools?
The sea of audience segmentation software is vast, but these tools aim to provide the same benefits and outcomes. As you’re exploring your options, look for these must-have features:
- Multiple audience segmentation options. Choose tools that give you flexibility in how you segment your audience, including choosing multiple segments in a single campaign. Examples include:
- Demographic segmentation (age, sex, income, education, etc.)
- Behavioral segmentation (purchase history, interactions, etc.
- Psychographic segmentation (values, interests, lifestyles, etc.)
- Geographic segmentation (location-based data)
- Technographic segmentation (technology usage)
- Custom segmentation (other criteria of your choice)
- Advanced data analytics to accurately segment your audience. Easy-to-understand analytics build confidence in properly segmenting your customers while helping you measure the effectiveness of your segmentation strategies.
- Real-time monitoring of audience behavior and preferences. Continuously and automatically monitor and update audience segments based on changing trends or behaviors.
- Integration with other marketing tools for seamless execution. Integration with email platforms, social media scheduling tools, CRM, and other systems improves data integrity and connects you with audiences via their preferred channels.
This is just a short list of capabilities that the best audience segment software offers. As you explore your options, think about your existing marketing tools and strategies and how segmentation capabilities can enhance them.
The Top Audience Segmentation Tools
Now that you know more about the purpose of audience segmentation tools, let’s look at seven top software options to help you personalize your marketing and communications.
1. Meltwater
The all-around best audience segmentation tool, Meltwater’s comprehensive consumer intelligence platform puts consumer intelligence in your hands. While most segmentation tools require you to know how to separate your audience, Meltwater helps you find hidden patterns and connections you have yet to explore.
Real-time, widespread insights and analysis from multiple data sources help you get to know your customers in new ways. Even when you’re not asking the right questions, Meltwater shines a light on customer behaviors and interests, giving you myriad ways to connect with them.
The secret sauce is Meltwater’s combination of proven market research methodologies, AI, and human data scientists. It’s a smarter way to segment audiences and learn the value and meaning of these segments with spelled-out reasoning.
2. Akita
Akita’s customer service management tool includes segmentation features to create unique views of your customers. Users can organize customers by fine-grained distinctions with the goal of improving customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Within the platform, you can filter your customers by various attributes. It automatically visualizes every metric so you can see changes in performance over time. You can search for specific contacts and accounts within segments for a more granular view.
Akita excels at providing sales teams with a 360-degree view of customers. They can see which attribution channels are performing well, learn more about engagements and behaviors, and get real-time alerts when segments change or when customers achieve special milestones.
3. Facebook
For social media advertising purposes, audience segmentation can help you improve your targeting and make the best use of your ad dollars. Meta (Facebook’s parent company) has built-in audience segmentation tools that help you optimize each campaign. You can craft new audiences for each campaign, reuse existing audiences, or lookalike audiences based on past performances.
Similar to third-party audience segmentation tools, Facebook lets you customize your targeting based on multiple filters, such as education, gender, job title, and lifestyle. Facebook uses a combination of its own data and yours to reach people who fit your criteria.
If you’re using Facebook (or Instagram) for advertising, you’ll have automatic access to Meta’s audience features. It’s included in the price you pay for ads, so there’s no extra investment on your part.
Tip: Take a look at these Facebook marketing tips, learn more about Instagram marketing and how to use Instagram ads, and get inspired by these Instagram marketing examples.
4. Pendo
Completing the initial transaction is just the beginning. Once users buy your product, your next goal is to help them get their money’s worth so they’ll remain loyal customers. User adoption platform Pendo helps you segment customers by their usage and adoption stages so you can continue delivering value throughout the relationship.
Made for SaaS companies, Pendo shows you what customers are doing once they purchase your software. Maybe there are features they haven’t adopted yet, or maybe they signed up for the service and haven’t logged in since. No matter their customer journey, Pendo helps you create standout digital experiences.
Your engineering team can use this data to build out future features and products your customers actually want. Sales teams can have more informed conversations with customers to reduce churn and spur revenue growth. And marketers and customer service teams can create resources that answer real questions and help users get the most from their investment.
Pendo offers a free, no-strings-attached plan so you can test its basic features.
5. Twilio Segment
Twilio’s Segment platform gives you a shortcut to personalized marketing. Serving as a single source of truth, Segment finds the intersection of audience, timing, channel, and behavior to meet your customers at the right moments.
It updates customer data in real time based on omnichannel touchpoints, such as email, SMS, apps, or website browsing. If conversions are your primary goal, Segment will optimize your offers based on the segment’s likelihood of buying.
Twilio Segment is ideal for creating real-time campaigns without spending weeks planning or collaborating with multiple teams. Launch campaigns and messaging faster while netting better results compared to traditional manual methods.
6. Cognism
Cognism is a sales prospecting tool, making it a great pick for audience segmentation. With a massive database of companies and contacts, users can build their ideal customer profiles and generate more qualified leads.
Tip: Learn how to do customer profiling.
Cognism offers filters not typically found with other audience segmentation tools. For instance, you can search for North American food and beverage companies that have recently received funding. Drill down even deeper with filters related to job titles and seniority to ensure you’re connecting with the right people.
You’ll also find intent-related data to spot leads who are ready to buy, a component of segmentation called lead scoring. Sales teams can optimize their time by focusing on high-scoring leads first to close more deals while giving low-scoring leads more time to warm up.
7. Mailshake
Another sales prospecting software, Mailshake focuses on meeting leads in the inbox and segmenting them based on email cadence actions. This platform combines lead sourcing and introductory conversations in one place, all backed by advanced filters to find your perfect prospects.
In Mailshake, you can find prospects by role, location, company, or a combination of these filters. Set up email cadences to time your messages based on the person’s responses and actions (or lack of) to make every message feel personal.
The intuitive interface and automation features make it easy to launch segmented campaigns quickly without losing personalization or relevance.
How Audience Segmentation Tools Drive Results
The benefits of audience segmentation software go beyond theoretical advice. Speaking from experience, Meltwater customers have seen tangible results and ROI impact using segmentation strategies.
- Haleon used Meltwater to uncover a new audience segment. Their team found that dental hygienists held a greater online influence than dentists when recommending products, leading its brands to update their partnership strategies and promotional partner pool.
- World Wildlife Fund gained essential Audience Insights to help them find new partners to promote high-level events. The non-profit identified five categories of influencers who could help them deliver relevant key messages, leading to a 12x lift in followers and 1.9 million Twitter impressions.
- The Economist relies on Meltwater’s location-based analytics and real-time updates to drive subscription growth. With the rapidly changing nature of social media and the news, the publication uses its audience insights to spark insightful conversations with the right people at the right times to turn data into more meaningful stories.
These are just a few examples of how real brands are using the power of segmentation to create lasting results. The possibilities are far-reaching and easier to achieve with the help of the right tools.
Getting Started with Meltwater’s Audience Segmentation Tool
Meltwater’s AI-powered consumer intelligence platform demystifies audience segmentation with its easy-to-use interface and widespread functionality. With consumer intelligence and social listening tools at your fingertips, you can learn about your audience beyond what they’re telling you and find new ways to connect with them.
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