MD07: Improve Conversions, Traffic and Earnings Doing Audience Segmentation

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Audience segmentation is a strategy that I have crafted looking to improve my blogs conversion rates, engagement level and ultimately earnings. The concept is very straightforward; to be as specific (you hear me say that word quite often through the episode) and targeted as possible with each of the different groups inside your audience.

The strategy involves identifying your audience and dividing it into segments with a variety of methods and tools (listed below). Each segment can be determine by a very large number of factors, specific topics of interest, geographical location, etc. you can be as complex as you want and mix several factors.

One thing that would really help you when implementing this strategy if you intend to consider geographical location to do your segments is the cultural background of that audience.

For example, I know that about 25% of my audience is located in India, 35% between the U. S. and U.K. and the rest from other countries including spanish speaking regions (you may want to see my article on why understanding your audience is important). Each of these respond better to different types of conversation styles, out of respect for them, I try to customize certain elements of my conversation based on this. People in Spain eat dinner at about 10:00 pm so if I’m sending a broadcast email that is time sensitive and can’t be postponed, I could take the opportunity to apologize for the interruption (I’m not saying that you have to do this, it’s just an example of a conversation customization).

You can consider colors and design based on relevancy to the topic or cultural background of your segment. If you look at my content curation Twitter accounts and Facebook Groups you will notice that I do my segmentation based on topics inside the Online Marketing industry and that I’m consistent with the colors that I use for each segment, this helps people in your communitty to quickly identify what it’s all about.

In This Episode You Will Learn:

1. How to Identify Segments in Your Audience if You Haven’t Started yet.

2. How to do it if You Already Have an Audience.

3. How to Create Channels of Communication For Each of Your Segments (and not lose a ton of time).

4. The Best Media For Creating These Channels.

5. How to Follow up With Your Segments (using email).

Resources Mentioned

Google Analytics

Amazon Books

Other Additional Tools

For competition analysis:

compete.com

alexa.com

similarweb.com

For cultural background marketing  analysis:

American Marketing Association

Harvard’s Working Papers

Consider applying this strategy to your content marketing efforts at least to some extent and I promise you will see the results.

Transcript

Increasing your conversion rates, traffic, and results with audience segmentation.

Hey, what’s up divers. Welcome to another episode of the Moneydiver podcast with your host, who speaks, Borja Obeso and thank you guys for leaving reviews ­­­­­tonight and I haven’t checked out the reviews some of you have been leaving and really, it’s very inspiring to see that I’m actually helping people with everything that I’m doing so, thanks for leaving those reviews. I really, really appreciate that and how’s your week going? I hope you’re having an awesome week. Mine starts only, starts only great cause I have decided to participate and try to qualify for one of the biggest motocross races in the world. I think it’s actually the biggest one and one of the most important ones. It’s called the Loretta Lynn’s Championship and it’s a very, very difficult race to get into because you have to go through a series of qualifying races and throughout the country in order to, you know, get into that, this main race and a lot of big brands and representatives are gonna be there and so I decided to start training for it. I wanna, I wanna qualify for it so I’m gonna have to create a very strict training schedule.

But let’s talk marketing. Let’s talk marketing because I have a very different or a very special show today. It’s just gonna be me. Not gonna have a guest today because we’re gonna speak about something that I have been doing for a while and it’s called audience segmentation and I’m gonna explain what that is in a moment. It’s not just a password, another marketing password because we already have a ton of those but they are necessary because marketing is about, you know, very specific things and strategies that need names. I mean, they do, they need name. So I don’t want you to get confused.

Audience segmentation is not the same thing as market segmentation. Market segmentation is what companies do when they try to select a specific market to create a product to target that market. Audience segmentation is for bloggers, podcasters, content marketers, anyone who has an audience, anyone who speaks to an audience. And this is not selecting one audience, speak in only to that audience, this is creating groups inside your audience and finding ways to speak to those groups specifically. And the reason you want to do this is because when you speak to these people, these segments, specifically about that very specific topics that they want to learn about, you create more trust, you create more engagement, and you build your brand faster. You differentiate yourself. The way you do this is you look at the bigger picture of your audience. You define and identify a couple segments. You can do as many as you want but when you’re just starting out with this, you create a few, four, five maybe and then you use different media channels and tools which I will go through a little later. And you use these tools to communicate with these audience about things and topics that they wanna listen to, that they actually care about. And you can actually create segments based on the geographical location of your audience. I mean, if that’s relevant to your business, if that’s helpful to your business because for example maybe you are a real estate agency and you cater to different segments inside your city and you want to create different channels of communication with different people and different you know, hue and degrees or whatever. So what you do is you target these segments, these groups of people, these geographic locations then send them offers and content related specifically to that. Another example would be, maybe you have a food related website and you have audience from all around the world and people from different places in the world are gonna be interested in knowing about different types of recipes, right? So maybe you can have different channels, like maybe different Twitter lists or Google plus circles or Facebook groups and create content that would be appealing to those people. Maybe you have an audience in Italy so you can create recipes, pasta, pizza, calzone, what have you. Maybe you have people from South America and you can have, you know, food and recipes related to them, and so you get the idea. Or maybe you have people just inside the United States who are looking for different recipes and you see that by looking at your analytics and targeting the places where these people hang out, you know, maybe you can go to different forums on the internet and talk specifically to one of your segments and then go to Twitter accounts or experts on or different chefs on different types of foods and talk to them. Maybe they can promote your articles related to the food that they cook. So you get the idea right. You know, you had, you want to find different locations, different places where you can gather a community by talking specifically about what they wanna listen, about what they want to learn.

So let’s talk how you actually identify these segments. If you don’t have a blog, if you don’t have an audience, if you don’t have a podcast yet, haven’t got started, there are several ways to do it. Got to the websites of your competitors, see the different categories that they have in their website. Go to Amazon dot com and look at books related to your topic and see the different chapters, the sub-chapters inside that book. Go to, go to Google and see different keywords that are being used, you know, search phrases that are being used in Google to find answers. And then, when you’re creating your website, and when you’re creating your whole content, strategy, to write articles, to create podcast or videos, keep those topics in mind because you want to use those to target these people specifically.

If you do have an audience, you do have traffic to your website, to your blog, it’s very simple. Look at the most popular post of your website. Go to your Google analytics and there’s a section in Google analytics inside, content and old pages and it’s gonna show you all the different, you know, articles or pages that are most popular, the ones that gets most traffic, so you wanna start there. Also you can, if you’re using geographical location, you can also use Google analytics. Maybe you can afford to speak in different languages and so you might want to consider that if you can afford it, if it makes sense for your business. Only if, coz otherwise you’re just gonna be wasting time and effort on trying to speak on different languages and translating your whole content. And I’m actually a big fan of translating content because of several reasons but that’s a whole different topic. So you go to analytics, you identify them five, four or five most popular topics, I hope they are a completely different topics, you write them down and you’re gonna use those when you creating your content and when creating communication channels. And communication channels are all of the different places where you can get traffic that is related to your segment. For example, social media accounts, social media networks, or search engine optimization strategies. Maybe you reach out to other bloggers that talk specifically about your, you know, one of your segments. Maybe you use paid advertising which is very direct way to gather people and target people, target your segments. For example, I use different Twitter accounts, all branded on their, the Moneydiver brand. You might have seen them around. One is for search engine optimization, one is for social media marketing, the other one’s for podcasting tips and content marketing, the other one’s for blogging, the other one’s for email marketing, conversion rates optimization. So you can see those are my segments. So what I do with these accounts is I curate content. I find articles that are super powerful and valuable about those specific topics and I create these segmented audiences which appreciate that I’m delivering content more specific to their actual interest. And I know this can be a little overwhelmed, this can be very subjective because how specific can you go. That’s, you know, that’s entirely up to you and up to your research but what this has result on for me is it has increased all of my followers across all of my social media. It has increased my email list subscribers, it has increased my traffic because now I get, I also get more links from websites because they see that I’m really focused on delivering very specific content, very carefully, and thinking about people. Also, by curating content on each of these account, I’m also making, creating connections with the actual authors of these content and I make sure that I only curate or share content that is related to the segment of that account. I also use Facebook groups. I have Facebook groups for search engine optimization, social media, etcetera. Like I just mentioned, I also use Google Plus circles to create, you know, understand what different people are talking about and communicating with them, creating conversations. I have a virtual assistant that finds questions. He sends me all the questions to my email then I go personally and I answer the questions. So what I do is I tell this assistant to find questions relating to search engine optimization, to find specific questions related to podcasting, and then I take some time of the day to go and answer those questions specifically and direct people to the different places in my brand like my blog or my other accounts or maybe other people’s account, if think, sorry, other people content if I think it’s gonna be helpful for their questions so that way, you know, you’re being super specific.

And I want you to do something. I want you to go to Twitter and type in the search box “Mashable” and look at all of the different accounts that Mashable has. Now of course Mashable is a huge brand so they can afford to have like, I don’t know, fifteen or twenty different accounts but you get the idea. You can do the same thing at your level. And another place I’d like to go for segmented traffic is Reddit because Reddit has something called subreddits. Subreddits talk about specific topics and you can find an unlimited number of subreddits. There’s tons of subreddits. When you become a member of that community, you ask questions, you respond to questions. Don’t just promote you content because they’re gonna kick you out of Reddit in a second if you’re a spammer. But be valuable on, you know, ask questions and engage with people. Make them know your name. Make sure that your, your nickname is actually your name so you create top of mind awareness and become really helpful on the subreddits. Then you know, ultimately, you can find opportunities to introduce your content to them. If it’s related to questions and so you start gathering traffic from these subreddits and, you know, create a targeted audience, a targeted segment. Then once you identify all of the different places where you’re gonna be gathering, you know, segmented traffic, you want to build a list, of course, because that’s the number one thing that you should be doing if you are a content marketer, a blogger, or podcaster. And it’s wonderful what you can do with email software. You can create different segmented list and then create, autoresponder sequences, and you can go back to episode five, I believe, of the Moneydiver podcast to on how to create autoresponder sequences that are specific about your segments and communicate and create an audience that loves you because you’re talking specifically about their problems and if they are, if they wanna move on from your list, they can, you can just give them the opportunity to move on to a different segment if you are that specific and you know, that, that targeted. And this gives you the opportunity to introduce products and offers to your audience that are specific, again, sorry that I keep repeating the word “specific” but that what this is all about. You can introduce products that are specific about their problems and you get, you have, you know, higher conversion rates and higher chances of actually making more money from, from your efforts because you’re taking the time to go and handpick these products or maybe they are your own products or maybe they are someone else’s products. Infant products or softwares or whatever it is that are gonna solve these people problems. And so it’s a wonderful thing instead of trying to waste all of your efforts promoting one general thing to your whole audience coz that’s just not gonna bank any cents at all. You’re gonna waste your efforts, you’re gonna get more unsubscribers because you’re sending emails that are not related to what they wanna learn about, etcetera.

So I’m being super broad about this strategy right now. Coz it would take me, you know, hours of going through each specific step but for that I’m creating a guide, a free guide for all of you guys about audience segmentation and it would be super helpful if you send me your questions based on everything that you just listened to. Send me your questions and I’ll make sure to include those, those answers on the guide as well.

So there you have it guys. A very basic overview of what, what is audience segmentation; how it can help you increase your traffic, increase your conversion rates, email subscribers, and help you make more money. Help you differentiate yourself from your competition because you’re being that much more specific with your audience. And ultimately, improve your results. Once again guys, thank you very much for listening to this show. You can head on over to Moneydiver dot com slash episode seven for the show notes. I’ll include everything that I mentioned here. I’ll include more tools and resources that you can use to identify your segments and create channels of communication and then ultimately, monetizing these segments.

So guys, thanks, go out, learn, and keep on diving.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.