What Is Multi-Segment Marketing?
Your target audience includes everyone you want to sell products to. It can be a broad group.
Breaking your target audience into several smaller groups—segments—makes it possible to market your product more specifically to each one. Often, improving the odds the marketing will resonate.
It’s a strategy known as multi-segment marketing. And it can be a useful tool for increasing campaign engagement.
Today, you’ll learn how to do it in just seven simple steps.
Real-World Examples of Multi-Segment Marketing
Nike is an excellent example of a company that practices multi-segment marketing. It breaks its audience into segments based on demographics, psychographics, and consumer behavior.
Nike has distinct marketing campaigns directed at professional athletes, weekend warriors, and people who wear athletic clothing as a fashion statement. Nike also offers unique customer experiences based on demographic profiles, with personalized content. Like in the Nike Women campaign.
This tactic helps ensure message relevance.
An example: If you’re an avid golfer who only buys Nike apparel and gear related to golf, you’d probably respond enthusiastically to Nike’s golf-related marketing. But it would be a waste of Nike’s time and resources to market tennis apparel to you.
This is how multi-segment marketing can aid in making campaigns more effective. It helps you leave audience members out of campaigns they aren’t likely to respond to. And included them in the ones they are.
The good news is you don’t need to be a massive company like Nike to take advantage of multi-segment marketing. One product or service with broad appeal is enough to effectively market to distinct groups within your target audience.
Take Manta Sleep.
They started with one product—a weighted sleep mask anyone can use.
They segmented their market to grow their product line and scale their business.
Manta Sleep recognized that people buy sleep masks for a variety of reasons. And they have different motivations depending on where they are in the world.
Image Source: Big Flare
This had big results for Manta.
Within a few years of applying a multi-segment strategy to their Google Ads, Manta Sleep’s monthly revenue increased from $10,000 to $100,000.
The Importance of Multi-Segment Marketing Today
Modern day consumers have a wide range of choices for most of their purchase decisions. To be a contender, a business’ marketing has to make its offering stand out.
To that end, multi-segment marketing is important for several reasons.
It Enhances Customer Targeting
Identifying target audience differences lets you customize your marketing messages to resonate with each segment.
This is important because customers who feel like you genuinely understand them are more likely to buy from you. In fact, 51% of consumers say their relationship with a brand begins when they feel like the brand understands them and their desires.
It Increases Market Reach
It may seem counterintuitive, but segmenting a broad customer base into niche audiences can actually help you reach a wider audience.
How?
It lets you tap more deeply into new markets.
Let’s say you sell sugar-free gummies. Because your product has broad appeal, you could launch a mass marketing campaign aimed at everyone who buys gummies. Or, you could create a multi-segment marketing campaign with messaging tailored to niche audiences.
Health-conscious consumers might resonate with one marketing message. Parents of children who love gummies might respond to another. And consumers concerned about dental health might respond to a third.
Suddenly, audiences that might have only been marginally interested in your product before are far more engaged with your brand. Because of that, word about your products spreads further in each segment than it otherwise would.
This market segmentation strategy enables you to reach an audience you may not have with a one-size-fits-all approach. Consider it an opportunity to tap into a new customer base and increase your overall market share.
It Improves Product Development
If you try to appeal to everyone, you may miss out on product improvement opportunities. Understanding the distinct needs of specific segments can be the catalyst for developing new products or services.
And a new product offering can help you tap into new markets.
For example, adding a less expensive version of your best-selling product could attract prospective customers with lower income levels.
It Provides a Competitive Advantage
Addressing your segments’ specific and varied needs can position your business as a leader in each niche. This is often a big advantage. Especially if your competitors are missing the opportunities your segmentation strategy is affording you.
Another gummy business might have thought about health-conscious consumers and parents of kids who like gummies. But if it hadn’t thought to segment its messaging to the dental-health conscious shopper, too? That group is more likely to be focused on you.
Showing your audiences you “get them” by addressing their pain points, hopes, and dreams can set you apart from the competition.
And in a busy marketplace, a competitive advantage is a welcome win.
It Concentrates Marketing Efforts
Instead of spreading resources thin to reach a broad audience, marketing teams can concentrate their efforts and budget better with segmentation.
Rather than spend your entire marketing budget on a broader, less-effective campaign, allocate equal portions of a percentage of your total budget to each segment. Then, pump more money into the segments getting the best results.
Focus funding on the channels, messages, and strategies that are most effective for each segment. And spend more in the segments that are responding best. Your marketing dollars can go farther, and you're more likely to enjoy a higher return on investment (ROI).
It Increases Adaptability to Market Changes
Markets are constantly evolving. A multi-segment approach gives your business a fighting chance to adapt if there’s sudden or surprising change.
Imagine you run a company that sells durable outdoor gear. Your audience is segmented by hardcore outdoor enthusiasts, weekend warriors, and eco-conscious consumers. Your marketing team notices a significant uptick in social media conversations around sustainable living and eco-friendly products—especially within the eco-conscious consumer segment.
Because you segment your audience, you saw the market change. You can develop a new product line that appeals to eco-conscious shoppers. Get ahead of the market and outperform the competition that was not aware of the growing trend.
It Grows Profits
You can see how each of the previous benefits could lead to increased profits: Reaching more markets, fostering more trust, beating out the competition, and efficiently managing marketing spend.
But it’s also true that just delivering personalized, relevant products and messages can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, too. When a brand personalizes its offerings, consumers are 76% more likely to purchase. And 78% more likely to make repeat purchases.
This is all possible with multi-segment marketing. It can have a huge boosting impact on a customer's lifetime value.
How to Craft a Multi-Segment Marketing Strategy
There’s no one-size-fits-all message that will speak to every person in your target audience.
Consumer preferences vary.
A multi-segment marketing strategy allows you to craft messaging that resonates with each group.
Use these seven steps to craft a winning multi-segment marketing strategy.
Step 1: Research Your Target Audience
Before you’re able to identify segments, you need to know who you’re marketing to more broadly.
Define your target audience.
One of the best ways to discover your target audience is to conduct audience research on your closest competitors.
Powerful audience research tools like One2Target from Semrush can help.
To get started, open One2Target and type the URLs of your competitors in the search bar. Press “Enter” or “tab” after each URL to create your list.
Let’s say you sell mountain bike clothes for women and aspire to capture some of your biggest competitors' market share. You might enter Shredly, Troy Lee Designs, and Wild Rye—all big names in women’s mountain bike apparel.
Click “Analyze.”
You’ll see the default “Demographics” dashboard. It looks like this:
In the results, you’ll find valuable information about your top competitor's audiences.
Click the tabs across the top of the page—Demographics, Socioeconomics, Behavior, and Audience Overlap—to discover the following characteristics:
- Average age
- Most popular social media channels
- Marital status
- Education level
- Most used device
Analyze this information. These characteristics and traits can inform the broad target market for your products and services.
Step 2: Define Your Target Segments
Once you’ve identified your broader target audience, define your target segments.
Consider factors like demographics, buying behavior, and psychographics. This should be relatively easy since you already discovered potential customer characteristics with the One2Target tool.
But how do you turn this information into target segments?
You need to understand each segment's motivations, challenges, and behaviors. Basically, what makes members of that subgroup alike.
For example, you may segment your mountain bike audience into beginner, intermediate, and advanced riding abilities.
Beginners will likely need help picking the right gear. When targeting this segment, you’ll avoid highly technical jargon in your messages and focus on basic how-tos.
Advanced riders may want to know specific details in order to achieve optimal performance. Like the weight of a pair of shorts. Your campaigns targeting this segment can be more technical and include niche-specific language.
As you break your broad audience into smaller subsets, create buyer personas for each segment. Buyer personas can provide your marketing team with a relatable representation of the marketing segment.
What does a buyer persona look like? Well, like an average person in your target group.
For instance, instead of talking to a faceless, nameless consumer, your marketing team can make campaigns specifically for Tracey, a 45-year-old school teacher and mom of three teenagers in Leavenworth, Washington. She started mountain biking last year.
The more specifically you can define your target's needs and desires, the more likely it is your campaigns will resonate. Fostering that emotional connection will help attract them to your brand and products.
Step 3: Set Clear Objectives for Each Segment
Multi-segment marketing campaign objectives range from increasing brand awareness to boosting sales within a segment. Plus, everything in between.
Let's say your segment is women new to mountain biking. Your objective could be increasing brand recognition by 30% over six months. A 30% increase is a clear, quantifiable target. And setting a deadline of six months provides a specific timeframe to evaluate progress against.
You’ll also need a plan on how to measure results. For a brand recognition campaign, you could measure progress with metrics like social media mentions, survey responses acknowledging brand awareness, or increased organic website traffic.
Setting clear and specific objectives leads to precise progress tracking. It also makes it easier to adjust strategies on the fly.
Step 4: Develop a Tailored Marketing Mix for Each Segment
Customizing elements can help you connect with each segment more thoroughly.
A tailored marketing mix could look like:
- Products for different age groups: A pair of bike shorts could appeal to a younger segment because they’re brightly colored. More mature women in another segment might appreciate a comfortable yoga-style waistband.
- Products for different uses: A tech company may offer a basic, user-friendly version of their software to a consumer segment so it can be easily used at home. And provide an advanced, feature-rich version for technical professionals.
- Discounts and premium pricing: SaaS companies may offer discounted subscriptions for a student segment. And premium, feature-heavy subscriptions for their segment including large corporations. Your pricing strategy can reflect each segment's purchasing power and perceived value.
- Where the product is purchased: A skincare brand might sell its basic range through online platforms, targeting a tech-savvy audience segment. And it might sell its premium range in high-end retail stores to offer a personalized shopping experience for their luxury consumer segment.
Step 5: Implement the Segment-Specific Strategies
Based on the identified needs of each segment, create a calendar that outlines what type of content will be published, when, and on which platform. Executing against this holistic plan ensures you’ll produce a steady stream of relevant content for each segment.
For instance, you might reach new mountain bikers on Instagram with campaigns featuring short, highlights-only Reels. And you may launch separate campaigns to capture competitive bikers with longer, skills-development tutorials on YouTube.
Whatever your mix, building your content calendar and getting campaigns live is a great way to start learning.
Step 6: Monitor and Measure Performance
Monitoring and measuring campaign performance is critical to achieving your multi-segment marketing goals.
Why?
Because guessing rarely works.
The “Audience” feature in Google Analytics can provide a granular look at how customers behave and interact online.
You can learn things like:
- Where your traffic comes from
- How they engage with your pages
- Who’s purchasing what products
Pairing Google Analytics with the Audience Intelligent app can help you dig even deeper into your audience segments.
But don’t make the mistake of collecting data and doing nothing with it.
The real value of data comes from action. If analysis shows a particular approach isn’t working—say, premium product promotions underperform on Facebook but excel on Instagram—it's a sign to reallocate your budget and tailor your content strategy to where it will have the most impact.
Step 7: Refine and Adjust Strategies
As you gather and analyze your campaign performance data, refine and adjust your specific marketing strategies. This proactive, iterative approach is what can set you apart from your competitors.
Feedback from your novice mountain bike audience might reveal they love a pair of shorts for their durability but wish they had more pockets. When next season’s shorts have more pockets, your customers will be thrilled you paid attention.
This approach isn’t just for product development. It applies to your marketing, too. If your competitive bikers segment isn’t engaging much with your tutorial videos on YouTube, you can try influencing them with user-generated content instead.
The point is: By continually refining your strategies based on specific insights from your audience segments, you create products and marketing messages that resonate more deeply with them all.
Prepare for Future Market Changes
Semrush tools like One2Target and Audience Intelligence App paired with Google Analytics Audience can help you stay dynamic and flexible. This strategy will help you meet your diverse customer needs and drive your business toward sustained growth and market relevance.
It all starts with Semrush. Start your free trial today.