19/10/18

Segmentation

What is segmentation?

Segmentation is simply the process of dividing and organising the population into meaningful and manageable groups – or segments – so that you can tailor your cultural offer and communications to the preferences of each group.

Why segment?

If you want to persuade someone to do something (like attending an event), the more you know about them, the better your chances of success. You can make sure, for example, that you tell them about something that interests them, or that you use their favoured means of communication, or even that you don’t put them off by telling them about something that they’re definitely not interested in.

The trouble is, not everyone is persuaded by the same things. Making assumptions about what all audiences/visitors want on the basis of what only SOME people do or say could limit the size and diversity of your audience. Segmentation helps make sense of these variations so that you can devise strategies to engage particular audiences based on the appropriate behaviours and characteristics which they share. It is in effect a recipe for reaching wider and different audiences, more often and more cost-effectively.

What makes a useful segment?

We all like to think of ourselves as individuals, but it is not manageable for any organisation to treat each individual audience member as a separate segment.

So part of the art of segmentation is to make judgements which are appropriate to your own situation. A useful segment checklist should be:

• Relevant: identified by things that your organisation can respond to

• Distinguishable: with characteristics demonstrably and measurably distinctive from other segments

• Sizeable: of sufficient size to be worth the effort of targeting them

• Locatable: once identified, you have a way of being able to communicate with them directly

Segmentation criteria

There are lots of ways of segmenting an audience. The guidance here is simplified to make the most of the information available through the Audiences section. It is a process of grouping people based on a combination of shared characteristics in the following table:

How to segment:

Step 1: Audience Behaviour

The first thing you have to do when segmenting is to have knowledge on who it is you want to engage and why.  For instance, a target audience such as families might require further segmenting based on other demographics such as the age of the children, or motivations for participating etc. To make sure you have relevant segments, you can group your audiences/visitors by their current behaviours.

Step 2: Identify and describe your external marketplace

Recognise and understand those people that exist in the wider marketplace and that are similar to your target audiences. Use insights and knowledge from secondary data sources such as National Office for Statistics (ONS) and the DCMS’s Taking Part (a continuous national survey about engagement and non-engagement in culture, leisure and sport), to understand more about who resides in your catchment area.

Step 3: Plan, Locate, and target segments

Once you’ve selected your data sources, you need to start thinking about who and what it is that you want to combine and choose information that fits with your relevant strategic goals. When you know who is on your database, you can then identify others in your locality who share similar interests or look to see where potential may lie, i.e. those who are not currently engaging but could be. For example, look at your existing audience data for the following indicators:

• Are some postcode areas under or over-represented? Is this because of the demographics of the people living in that area or could it be due to other factors, e.g. travel facilities, infrastructure etc.
• Think about your market penetration not just in terms of numbers of attendees – you may have a small number of people attending from a particular target group, but as it is a small group locally your market penetration could be considered high.

By using segmentation tools such as Mosaic or Acorn to profile your database, you can analyse and describe the segment profile of customer neighbourhoods based on your postcode data. You’ll then be able to see which Groups and Types make up your audience; it will almost certainly be the case that some of these will be much better represented than others. These ‘dominant groups’ may be said to represent your ‘core’ audience. If more people like them live in your catchment area, they may be likely to display a propensity to attend events at your organisation (i.e. there may be more like-minded people in your locality who are predisposed to attending your events but not currently doing so). By looking at your audiences in this way, you can use these profiles alongside your Area Profile Report to try and identify where more people of the same kind live.

Step 4: Make it SMART, define the measures of success

For each of your target audience segments, you can set a SMART objective. For example: Implement a test drive campaign to target South Asian families within a 5-mile radius of your organisation for a 2015 summer Mela event. Use the information you have gathered about each segment to make realistic assumptions when setting numeric targets. Identify how many you aim to attract, and ensure such targets are consistent with your strategy, for instance, you may set lower targets for new audiences compared to existing audiences.

Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Relevant
Time-Bound

Step 5: Build segments into your audience development plan

Use this information within your audience development plan to help identify how you will achieve goals based on reaching and developing new and/or existing audiences. Use your knowledge and understanding of the catchment area and segment profiles as the basis for devising marketing activities. You can then target audience segments with tailored communications for events based on their previous engagement behaviour, attitudes and/or propensity to attend. On the other hand, it may be the case that some of the less well-represented segments could form new target audiences for your organisation to reach with new cultural offers and messages e.g. outreach, access and inclusion work.

You should consider the type of cultural offer and promotional messaging that is most appropriate, based on the behaviours of what a particular segment is likely to respond to. For example, do they need to be won over with discounted offers to more traditional events, or are they more likely to be influenced with exclusive premium-priced packages to contemporary cutting-edge events? Communications can then be planned based on knowledge of where they live, e.g. door to door leaflet distribution, local newspaper advertising, buy-in to customised mailing lists, or even to help you decide on the tone and image of the messaging.

Conclusion:

When put into practice, segmentation can be used as both a basis for a deeper understanding of organisations audiences and as a tool to attract new ones. You may need to use bits of your data at different times to inform your segmentation strategy to help achieve specific audience development objectives. This will also require constant topping up of the information you have about audiences in order to build upon that knowledge over time.