7 Best Practices for Market Segmentation That Batman Didn’t Know

Batman was great. But he never would’ve survived in 2024. 

Think about it: If Batman categorically segmented his audience, he could target their nefarious ploys and coordinate efforts against common threats, building crime-fighting efficiency, better protecting the citizens of Gotham City and enhancing the overall Batman experience. 

He might use more intimidation and psychological tactics to deter small-time criminals. For crime bosses and their networks, he could gather intelligence over time and systematically dismantle their operations. Batman could segment his public outreach, using targeted messages to reinforce his position as a symbol of hope across Gotham.

With a segmented audience, he could save — and leverage — so many resources. And while Batman isn’t likely to adopt market segmentation 80 years into the game, you can achieve equally heroic results by incorporating it into your strategic toolkit. 

So, here are the best practices nobody told Batman about to address the targeted needs, behaviors and motivations of different groups within your market. 

Market Segmentation 101

Market segmentation separates your audience into smaller groups based on demographics, goals, common interests and other psychographic or behavioral criteria. This allows your brand to connect with audiences at a personal level, catering to their specific needs and building trust.

By segmenting customers, you can formulate tailored sales and marketing messages and hone product development cycles according to your customer base. This gives you the keys to: 

• Stronger messaging: Want a higher conversion rate? Say goodbye to vague messages targeting everyone (and yet no one in particular), and speak to your audience as though you’ve been living inside their head for years. 
• Niche market opportunities: Segmentation identifies underserved markets and new ways to serve existing markets. Hit two flocks of birds with one stone — and use this to leverage growth. 
• Optimized campaigns: If your marketing campaign flags aren’t fluttering, improve response rates by tailoring your language and products to the audiences that resonate with them most.
• Addressing customer needs: You offer great solutions but you don’t have everybody’s solution. Find the people who need what you’re selling, then help them to get it.
• Enhanced digital marketing strategies: When you know your audience, you can learn which tactics have worked for them in the past and build from the shoulders of giants, rather than figuring it out from scratch.

I could go on. The bottom line is this: If you want to ramp up customer engagement, boost the impact of your data analytics and add to your marketing essentials toolkit, a customer segmentation strategy is the way to go. 

How To Segment Customers

The following shows the core approaches to market segmentation. Remember, the goal here is to understand how people respond in a given situation, such as which segment is likely to purchase specific products or engage with your brand. 

By segmenting your email audience, for instance, you could craft high-value subject lines to improve open rates, pack in more resources to enhance CTR and polish your call to action to strengthen conversions. Here are a few ways to segment your audience:

Demographic Segmentation

Demographic segmentation classifies markets based on individual attributes. What we buy, how we buy it and the messages that resonate with us are often driven by demographics. Grouping customers by personal characteristics lets you reach them with the right messages and products according to their needs. 

This is a sound approach for small B2C businesses or those embarking on early projects. To gather demographic information, create surveys for your audiences or lean into reliable, available third-party data. You can segment customers based on their: 

• Age.
• Gender identity.
• Household income.
• Education.
• Marital status.
• Nationality. 

Demographic segmentation can also help predict future behaviors since groups with similar characteristics often behave in like-minded ways. 

Firmographic Segmentation

The firmographic segmentation model follows a similar classification to the above, although it focuses on organizations rather than employees. This helps B2B marketers understand identifiers like company size, number of employees, industry and revenue. It should identify how serving a corporate enterprise would differ from a small startup. 

You can find this information in public listings, trade reports or undertake audience surveys to beef up the data.

Behavioral Segmentation

Customer behavior can be distinguished by purchase intent, benefits sought and response or engagement. It requires a more nuanced approach and can be used by B2B and B2C marketers to target audiences based on their purchasing and engagement activities. By zeroing in on what you know they’re searching for, you can target them with products and services they’re more likely to buy. 

Transactional Segmentation

As a subset of behavioral segmentation, this focuses solely on transactional data, rather than website browsing and engagement. Understanding how often a user purchases, items bought and average total spends helps personalize the customer experience. It can also optimize sales cycles, improve brand loyalty and reduce attrition rates. 

Your audience’s behavioral and transactional characteristics can come from data in your existing customer base. You can also reach out to third-party databases or software (for example, Google Analytics provides behavioral insights on your website) to predict future purchasing behaviors. 

Psychographic Segmentation

Here’s where you dive into your customers’ minds — whether individuals or corporations — by categorizing their behaviors based on their motivators. Psychographic segmentation teaches you why they behave the way they do. This could cover anything from personality traits and lifestyle preferences to personal values and opinions.

To segment customers based on psychographics, you’ll need to gather information directly from them through surveys or other feedback mechanisms. Aim for a qualitative focus to understand what drives them. 

Geographic Segmentation

Defining your audience by geographic location can also offer insights into their specific needs, such as: 

• Environmental.
• Legal.
• Economic.
• Linguistic.
• Cultural.
• Urban vs. rural.

While understanding the geographic limits of your audiences helps target products, messaging and solutions, it can also guide market opportunities, such as strategic locations to expand operations. B2B and B2C marketers can discover where their audiences are based via surveys or accessible third-party data and software.

Best Practices For Market Segmentation

Wanna know how to become more efficient in your marketing efforts than Batpeople? We’ve got the goods here. The following best practices will help you tune into your customers faster than an FM modulator — and make about as much impact as they did when our favorite superhero first crashed the party. 

1. Let your market segment itself: Implement market research from day dot. As soon as a new lead gives you their contact information, ask a few extra questions about where they heard about you, company size, location or which products and services they’re more interested in hearing about. 
2. Follow the data: You may have an inkling that your customers are middle-income earners, but if their feedback puts them in the high-income brackets, listen to the numbers and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. 
3. Develop buyer personas: Once you’ve identified subsections within your target market, develop customer archetypes showing demographics, motivators, earnings, engagement habits and any other relevant information to standardize and direct targeted messaging. This not only creates consistency in cross-functional efforts but takes the guesswork out of future projects. 
4. Define clear audience segmentation criteria: When you start sifting through customer data, you’ll find patterns — but not every pattern deserves to be a segment. To identify winning groups in your customer segmentation analysis, look for:
   • Sufficient data to substantiate behaviors or characteristics of the group.
   • Accessibility to reach them affordably. 
   • A high enough volume of customers in this audience to add value through your efforts, but not so high your targeting becomes crowded or vague. 
   • Responsiveness, because what good is an unresponsive customer segment? 
5. Position your brand: Now that you know who your audience is and why they’re here, how can you position your brand and its offerings to address their needs? For example, gyms may target health and wellness with one audience, and bodybuilding with another. 
6. Know when to segment: Market segments are impacted at different times of the year — and across the years. Spending frenzies are rife around Christmas time, and people have a greater need for heating solutions in winter. Meanwhile, FM modulators are not as popular as they once were. Refreshing your market segmentation seasonally, annually or in times of rapid change helps you stay on top of shifts and trends. 
7. Remain flexible and open: One thing I will hand to Batman is that he didn’t hang on too tightly to the Joker or organized crime syndicates; he remained open to refereeing new shades of villainous acts constantly. It’s necessary to stay adaptive over time because various internal or external factors can present opportunities and natural dead ends. Either way, these make room for new growth. 

Speak To Your Market Directly Through Segmentation

When objectives and audiences are strategically aligned, marketers and vigilantes can address segments’ needs and motives directly, achieving justice with email open rates, continuing the fight against vague messaging and combatting supervillains in triumph. 

So, take these best practices for market segmentation for a spin and see whether you can one-up Batman to create a holistic approach, addressing your audience exactly where they’re at.