Understanding your audiences. A guide to segmentation and strategy

By Fran Taylor

SUMMARY

The more we understand our audiences, the more powerful our impact will be. Understanding how to effectively segment our audience is an an important step to connect more effectively with our existing audiences and also to engage with new and diverse visitors and groups. Freelance marketing consultant Fran Taylor guides us through the basics.

When you get your audience strategy right, there are so many benefits for you and your organisation. Your customers will have a better experience, you’ll get more engagement and your marketing will be more impactful. There are lots of reasons to update or create a new audience strategy. Maybe you need to appeal more to younger audiences, or maybe you want to be more accessible and inclusive?

What is audience segmentation?

Rather than treating your audience as one big group with the same preferences and needs, it makes sense to break them down into smaller groups so you can tailor your products and marketing to them. There are different models you can use (either one or a combination):

Geographic segmentation: Where people are live and work (this could be local, national or international)
Demographic segmentation: Life stage, family circumstances, education, occupation, race, nationality, religion, gender and more
Behavioural segmentation: Buying habits, how often and when they visit, the kinds of exhibitions and events they attend and how they like to communicate with you
Psychographic segmentation: Attitudes, lifestyles, values and motivations

Each type of segmentation has its own pros and cons. For example, if you are putting on a theatre show for young children, you can use geographic and demographic targeting to appeal to families within a five mile radius. But the flip side is that it can make assumptions about people based on their life stage, rather than who they are as a person.

If you want to boost your Membership sales, behavioural segmentation can help identify customers who are most engaged, but it’s tricky to get the right systems in place to track this. Psychographic segmentation deals with people’s motivation and feelings, which means you are talking more directly to their emotions, but again, it can be expensive to implement. Of course no technique is perfect – people by their very nature are complicated and can’t always be put into little boxes.

Should you outsource our audience segmentation?

You have three choices in creating your strategy: do it yourself, work with a supplier using an existing segmentation tool, or pay for a bespoke model. If you are a small organisation with a very straight forward offer, doing it yourself is a realistic option. However, you need to be aware that you’re at risk of internal bias and it will be hard to benchmark against other organisations.

If you use a supplier with an existing tool, it means that they have already done a lot of the research for you. For example, they can tell you the potential size of your market, what media they consume and how they liked to be talked to. Within the arts, there are some well-established suppliers including the Audience Agency’s Audience Spectrum (a geo-demographic profiling and targeting tool that segments the UK population by its attitudes to culture) and MHM Culture Segments (a psychographics-based system looking at attitudes and values in the arts).

What do you know about your existing audiences?

The first step in creating your strategy is to do an audit of your existing online and onsite customers. You need to be curious and learn as much about them as possible – how they like to engage with you, what they like about you and what they find frustrating. You can find this in the following places:

In-person customers: Ticketing data, market research including surveys, polls and mystery shopping, case studies, anecdotal data from front of house staff and volunteers
Online audiences: Google Analytics website data, social media insights, email sign-ups, market research including surveys and polls

I’d also recommend meeting some of them face-to-face to really get to know them better. You could do this by setting up some events for them and get your staff to attend, organise focus groups or get your staff to all take turns working front of house. This audit will also help you figure out the gaps in your knowledge and give you some ideas on how to fill them.

Should you prioritise online or in-person audiences?

Due to financial challenges, a lot of organisations have high revenue targets which mean that segmentation is often skewed towards people who can buy tickets. But in reality you will need to do a bit of both. Raising your profile online will help boost awareness of your brand, build communities and give you opportunities for storytelling. An interesting example of this is the Tank Museum whose YouTube channel now has over 100m views and generates over £80k in ad revenue each year.

What are some of the challenges in creating an audience strategy?

One of the biggest challenges (whether you are a small or large organisation) is getting cross-organisational buy-in. It’s not enough for just your marketing team to be on board. This can mean rethinking large parts of your business, from onsite signage to the types of events you put on. Having buy-in from senior leadership and your trustees is also essential.

The second challenge is making sure your strategy is active and used (not just sitting in a folder). It helps if your audience segments are clear and easy for everyone to understand. You also need to engage staff with the new strategy from the very start through working groups, intranet articles, staff talks, presenting at team meetings, etc.

How can an audience strategy help you to be more accessible and inclusive?

Cultural organisations are supposed to be enjoyed by everyone. But there are still large groups in society who can’t access them for a variety of reasons. It’s important that your audience strategy can help identify these people and work hard to improve your products, services and marketing to make them more welcome. Again, this is about the products and services you offer, as well as marketing. Organisations like the Wellcome Collection are doing great work in this area.

A successful audience strategy is not just about selling more tickets. It’s about developing two-way relationships with your audiences that are meaningful and help keep visitor attractions exciting and relevant places to be. The more you understand your audiences, the more powerful your impact will be.