The shotgun approach, the one size fits all, one for all. These techniques unfortunately don’t work very well anymore in the marketing world. With audiences getting smarter and sceptical, campaigns in turn got smarter, more targeted and personalised. If you don’t segment data, your audience will lose interest very quick.

Push your mind back to your school days (hopefully it wasn’t too long ago), there were different friendship groups with defining characteristics, right? Segmenting data is similar, you want to group the data that have similar interests, wants or demands. These are either through their behaviour (repeat customers, loves a sale, regularly engages with campaigns etc.) Or with their demographic information (age, gender, company size, industry etc.), this mainly depends on what data you’re capturing about your audience.

If you don’t have this kind of information, it’s going to be hard to segment your data, your data governance strategy will struggle to take off and you’ll be left with the approaches mentioned at the start. First off, make sure you’re capturing the information your company wants and is helpful, there is no point capturing shoe sizes if you’re working for a bread manufacturer. Make sure the data is standardised and cleaned periodically, should the country be UK or United Kingdom? Once you’ve set it all up, remember that tailoring experiences is very important and you can only achieve it by segmenting your data.

As well as making sure our data is secured, structuring it well for analysis and segmentation is also imperative.

By: Matthew Lin