A Deep Dive into The IIA’s Audience
SEGMENTATION STUDY
What is Segmentation?
“Know Me and Be Relevant to Me”
Marketing strategy that involves dividing a broad audience into subsets of consumers who have characteristics in common.
Product development, operational refinement and marketing campaigns can then be designed and implemented to target these specific customer segments.
Often starts with demographics, but goes so much deeper.
You have two people, we know they’re the same age, we know they’re British citizens, and we know they’re of royal blood.
One of them is Prince Charles. The other is Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness. They’re in the same demographic segment, but I can’t imagine marketing to them the same way.*
* Harvard Business Review, July 2014
Typical Segmentation Descriptors
Psychographic: Emotional needs, social status, lifestyle, or personality type.
Decision Makers: Who decides to purchase the product or service.
Behavioral: Product usage (e.g. light, medium or heavy users).
Geographic: Specific area, such regions of the country or state.
Distribution: Where they purchase or consumer the product, such as online or in-person.
Demographic: Age, industry, income level, gender, race, nationality, language, etc.
To have value, segments must have certain qualities.
Identifiable: Able to see and be able to measure their characteristics, like usage or demographics.
Substantial: A segment must be large enough to be profitable.
Accessible: Need to be able to reach this audience via a communication channel.
Stable: Consistent enough to target with strategies and measure changes over time.
Differentiable: The people in a segment should have similar needs that are clearly different from the needs of other people in other segments.
Actionable: Able to provide products and offerings to the segment.
The Journey of a Million Miles Starts with a Single Step
The Martec segmentation study provides an important, initial perspective.
This will be a critical component in Data Strategy, with segments becoming more robust, yet refined, as additional intelligence is added.
People evolve and change and, as a result, there will be movement within the segments over time.
Understanding how we produced these segments
Methodology
Establishing segments is a highly iterative, analytical, and creative process
Ultimately, we needed to choose input variables to meet the following criteria:
They must divide the sample into unique, meaningful segments
They must be descriptive enough for targeted marketing purposes
They must be common enough to exist in the IIA’s database for typing tool purposes
This process led us to four input variables:
1) Age
2) Salary
3) Education Level
4) Company Size
..ultimately leading to 8 unique segments across both IIA members (5) and non-members (3).
Segment Overview
These eight segments were defined by the variables below but have additional differentiators that can be used for messaging, marketing, or content creation purposes.
The Path Forward
Implementing the sizing and segmentation analysis involves several action items:
Determine current penetration rates to understand growth potential, 2020 KPIs and goal setting
Utilize a typing tool to identify/ typify current and future members, slotting them into persona categories
Overlay the typing tool onto the current member database
Modify data field collection to fit typing tool inputs
Time will be needed to gather outstanding data elements
Incorporate segmentation as element of data strategy
Informs numerous aspects from data collection to dashboards, which informs operational planning and decision making process
Content, product and message development:
Targeted marketing messaging towards members (to enhance value) and non-members (to attract, motivate membership)
Support content creation and offerings (e.g. training, conferences, blogs, white papers, social media)
Key consideration as plan the global brand and advocacy approach