The digital marketing arena is changing daily with new innovations constantly emerging. We think that next paradigm shift to emerge this year will be a new form of segmentation and along with it, a new way to target that segment. This segmentation is based on a customer typology deeper than those currently gauged with social intelligence and content viewing indicators, i.e. gender, socioeconomic status, location, age, and social behavior. It is based on a person’s level of passion. According to this method there are 4 potential customer types to target:
Introducing The Passionate Segment
- Passion: People who are extremely passionate about a specific vertical/category, such as auto, travel or fashion and not essentially a specific brand within the category.
- Conformist: This segment may be interested in specific products or services right now, however it is more of a tangible need in a precise time period.
- Out-of-Range: These are not relevant to this category.
- Future Prospects: This group may be future customers within a category.
This targeting approach means that if marketers want to see real ROI from their marketing spend, they need to focus solely on the first segment — passionate consumers.
Who Your Passionate Segment Is and Why They Matter
Your passionate segment comprises people who are extremely engaged with a category’s products and content and conduct their own research before making any purchase decisions using numerous sources of information to do so. Furthermore, they often impact others, are relatively early adopters, and might be repeat customers. These users are also the ultimate content consumers of what we call the “age of discovery” — a stage wherein people don’t necessarily look for content by using search engines or on destination sites, but pull content “on the fly” whilst browsing casually and engaging in social networks.
Identifying the Passionate Segment
You can easily discover your passionate segment by using social intelligence, tracking search engine usage, and by identifying their casual content viewing habits. They are the decisive consumers of advertising and syndicated content.
Passion & ROI
Know for a fact that those in the passionate segment are willing to try new products. In fact, they are the most loyal buyers and an excellent audience for up-sell. They will join your fan pages, consume your content, be happy to hear about your specials, and even go as far as to share your products and content with their networks. In essence, they will be your brand ambassadors, your earned media.
Conclusion
This year will usher in the age of passionate segmentation as a key tracking and targeting method. Going forwards, marketers need to get to grips with using search engines, social networks, and content syndication technologies to track and attract this key target audience — the passionate segment.
Based on an article by Ariel Napchi.
