Social Segmentation for Content and Audiences

Social segmentation is a longtime practice of marketers — from segmenting their content based on where it’s being published and who’s seeing it, to segmenting their audience based on different demographics, this type of organization is crucial to a streamlined strategy. 

By segmenting your audience, you can determine which visuals they’ll respond to the best, and in turn, you can segment your content for better organization and streamlined posting. 

In this blog, we explore:

• What is social media segmentation? 
• How to segment customers.
• Four main types of customer segmentation.
• Why customer segmentation is important.
• What is a content segmentation grid? 
• How to segment content.

What Is Social Media Segmentation?

Audience and content segmentation is a strategic approach that divides both audience demographics and social media content into smaller, more manageable segments. 

Rather than targeting every single user on Instagram, your team will likely want to segment your target audience by demographic, geographical or behavioral factors. For example, let’s say you have a global Instagram handle but want to target a specific state. You’ll likely want to segment users who live in the region to help you organize your social media activities, like targeting boosted posts to the region or creating content that aligns with local trends. 

For content, this means organizing your content by UGC, product or other relevant theme. This makes it easy to connect content with your broader marketing goals — for example, let’s say a brand creates a content segment for a campaign promoting a new range of lipsticks. Rather than sifting through their content library or sourcing a new visual, they can draw on their content segment to easily pull an image or video of the new lipstick in action, saving you time and making your campaigns run smoothly.

Audience Demographics Segmentation

Audience demographics involve categorizing your audience based on characteristics like where your audience lives, how old they are, their purchasing power and more. By catering to specific groups by age, you can tailor your visuals and messaging to appeal directly to niche needs and solutions.

Content Demographics Segmentation

Conversely, social media content segmentation focuses on categorizing content based on themes, types or purposes. Whether for educational posts, behind-the-scenes glimpses, user-generated content or by campaign (you can even segment content within a broader campaign), segmenting content based on its type makes scheduling easier and provides a more organized and strategic distribution among different platforms. 

Implementing content segmentation requires a deep understanding of your audience and the versatility of your content. It's about finding the right balance and ensuring that each piece of content serves a specific segment of your audience, maximizing impact and fostering meaningful interactions. With the right insights and tools, social media managers can leverage content segmentation to elevate their strategy, driving engagement and achieving their marketing objectives with precision.

How to Segment Customers

Segmenting customers bleeds into your content strategy since this approach lets marketers tailor their content more effectively and develop a deep understanding of their audience. Social teams can use Social Media Analytics in Instagram Insights to gain a deeper understanding of their audience. Here, you can sort followers by net follower growth, and followers lost by your preferred time period, while you can gain a deeper insight into your followers in the ‘Follower Breakdown’ section, which breaks down age, location (city and country) and gender. You can also view your Pinterest followers by new followers and total followers by day, month and date published.

The Four Main Types of Segmentation

When marketing teams practice audience segmentation, they typically focus on four key groups: demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral. Each helps shape your social media strategy and plays a role in resonating with your target customer.

Demographic

Demographic segmentation categorizes the audience based on age, gender, income, education and occupation. Segmentation is fundamental because it helps tailor content that fits the basic characteristics of your target audience. If you find your team wondering how to increase engagement, harnessing demographic data is a great first step to trying (and potentially eliminating) themes in your content or other aspects of your strategy that might not resonate with your target demographic. For example, marketing luxury jewelry might not be impactful if you’re sharing content primarily where college-aged students show up. Your ads will likely be more successful in targeting high-earners on platforms and places where they’re most likely to show up.

Geographic

Geographic segmentation divides the audience based on their location, such as country, city or climate. This type of segmentation is vital to target content to specific regions and accommodate global or local preferences, languages and cultural nuances. It empowers social media managers to localize their strategies, making content more personal and regionally relevant.

Psychographic

Psychographic segmentation goes deeper, focusing on the audience's personalities, values, interests, lifestyles and opinions. This segmentation helps create content that resonates on a more qualitative, personal and emotional level. Social media marketers who understand psychographics can better align their content with the intrinsic motivations of their audience. For example, your brand might want to post to support a particular cause they and their audience believe in. By aligning your brand with issues your target audience cares about, you can build long-lasting connections and loyalty.

Behavioral 

Behavioral segmentation is based on the audience's actions, like purchase history, brand interactions and online behavior. It's about recognizing patterns in how the audience interacts with content and tailoring strategies, like remarketing campaigns, to those behaviors. For example, you might want to tailor paid social ads to target users who have visited your profile or a particular product page before. This hyper-specific approach allows social media managers to be more strategic in their content delivery, optimizing for when, how and what content gets engaged with the most.

Why Customer Segmentation Is Important

Customer segmentation is pivotal for companies aiming to fine-tune their marketing strategies, products and overall customer engagement. Categorizing customers into distinct groups based on shared characteristics or behaviors is important to a thorough, efficient marketing strategy since it helps teams tailor their tactics to meet specific audience needs and preferences. Overall, content segmentation is helpful for the following reasons.

Enhanced Communication

Segmentation allows for personalized communication that resonates with each customer group. Tailored messages have a higher chance of engaging customers, as they address specific interests or needs, making marketing efforts more relevant and impactful.

Product Development

Understanding the different segments helps companies design or adjust products to better suit the preferences of each group. This targeted approach can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, as products feel more personalized and relevant to the user's needs.

A/B Testing

Customer segmentation is invaluable for A/B testing, enabling businesses to identify which variations of a product, service or marketing message perform best with different segments. This precision leads to more informed decisions and optimizes the impact of your content and ads.

Targeted Promotions

Segmentation enables businesses to create promotions that appeal directly to the desires of specific customer groups. This increases the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and enhances the customer experience by offering deals that customers perceive as more personal, valuable and relevant.

What’s A Content Segmentation Grid? 

A content segmentation grid is a powerful tool brands use to guide their visual content strategy to ensure a balanced and strategic approach to content creation and distribution. This grid helps brands categorize their visual content across different dimensions, like content type, audience segment, platform and purpose. Here's a closer look at some of the most common ways social marketers segment their content:

Organizing Content by Type and Purpose

The grid allows brands to map out their content based on various types (e.g., images, videos, infographics) and purposes (e.g., educational, entertaining, inspirational). This organization ensures a diverse content mix that caters to different audience preferences and engagement goals.

Tailoring Content to Audience Segments

By using the grid, brands can align their visual content with specific audience segments. This means creating visuals that resonate with the interests, needs (i.e. income, lifestyle, living space) and behaviors of different groups (i.e. purchase frequency, their average amount spent, visitors of a specific product page), which help enhance relevance and engagement.

Platform-Specific Strategies

The segmentation grid also considers the unique characteristics and user expectations of different social media platforms. Brands can plan their visual content to leverage the strengths of each platform (e.g., Instagram for high-quality images, X for engaging visuals with text), ensuring optimal performance.

Consistency and Cohesion

Using a content segmentation grid helps maintain consistency and cohesion across all visual content. Brands can ensure that their visuals consistently reflect their identity, values, and messaging, strengthening brand recognition and loyalty.

Strategic Planning and Analysis

Finally, the grid facilitates strategic planning and analysis. Brands can track which types of content perform best on which platforms and with which audience segments, allowing for data-driven adjustments to the content strategy.

How to Segment Content 

The greatest thing about content segmentation is that you can segment content based on what works best for your brand. After you complete a content segmentation grid, you can create segments unique to your goals, campaigns and broader marketing goals. Dash Hudson understands that content segmentation happens throughout your day-to-day — here are some features you can use to segment your content effectively.

Creator Discovery 

Brands can use Creator Discovery in Relationships to find creators who are leaders in relevant categories to their industry and create segments — this comes in handy for sourcing influencers for future campaigns or organizing potential partnerships.

Social Listening

Social Listening is another great tool for segmenting content. Brands can create Topics based on top-performing posts, keywords and visual trends surrounding a particular term to create audience-driven content segments. This is a great way to explore the qualitative aspects of visual content trends.

Dash Hudson's Vision AI

Dash Hudson's Vision AI predicts which visuals from your Content Library will perform well, is woven throughout the Dash Hudson platform. Teams can segment their owned media into different segments based on the biggest areas of opportunity or even types of content you should post less. You can create new segments based on Vision’s prediction, or use Vision to explore pre-existing segments and sus out which visuals have the best chance to perform. 

Your team can also compare the engagement rate of segmented content to your overall posts, making it a great way to measure the impact of specific segments or your content shared using Vision.

Streamline and Segment Content With Dash Hudson

Beyond the tools described throughout this blog, brands can use Boards and Content Segmentation in Competitors to organize their content for Instagram, Twitter and YouTube and dive deep into their best-performing content. Once you segment content to a board, analytics are automatically pulled in so you can see how content performs. Finally, when it’s time to post, you can use Scheduler to plan and share your content across multiple social media platforms.

FAQs

How do you apply customer segmentation in content strategy?

To apply customer segmentation in your content strategy, start by analyzing your audience's demographics, behaviors and preferences. Use these insights to create tailored content that addresses the specific needs, interests and pain points of each segment, ensuring your messaging resonates and engages effectively with diverse groups within your audience.

How do you use market segmentation in your content strategy? 

Using market segmentation in your content strategy involves identifying distinct groups within your broader market based on factors like geographic location, psychographics and purchasing behavior. Tailor your content to appeal to the unique characteristics and preferences of these segments, optimizing your content's relevance and impact across different sections of your target market.