When it comes to digital marketing campaigns, audience segmentation is one of the most important steps you can take to be successful.

In an oversaturated market, it’s more common that consumers become irritated by marketing efforts than grateful. What are businesses doing today to stick out from the crowds? Connecting to their audience. No, we don’t mean following them on Twitter or connecting on LinkedIn. What they’re doing is personalizing their company’s marketing to connect on a deeper level to their target audience – and before personalization comes audience segmentation.

As part of July 2016 research from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Persado, a group of senior marketing executives from the US and Europe was asked about their approach to personalized marketing, and 67% said they used behavior-based data to develop content-based insights and emotions. We’ve created a list of ways that you can amp up your marketing by taking a similar approach.

How to Segment Audiences:

In order to personalize your marketing, you must answer the basic question: who is my audience? This is more than determining the industry the prospects are in or the job titles they hold. It is diving into who they really are. To segment your audience, consider questions like:

• What kind of buyer/s are they?
• What kind of life do they lead?
• Where do they live?
• When do they make purchases?
• Where do they research before they make a purchase?
• What kind of hobbies do they have?
• What holidays do they celebrate

Although not all of these questions result in numerical data, they can help you create specific segments that separate your audiences based on the marketing content that will best suit them and result in a positive reaction, and potentially an online purchase. Use this data to create campaigns for each segment.

Recognize & Target the Individual

Personalized marketing gives customers a sense of identity. Your customers want to know that they are important and that you are thoughtfully sharing content with them. Marketing too often falls into the behavior of a 5-year-old child shouting “me, me, me!” Instead, adapt your marketing to be customer-centric through marketing segmentation. If your customer sees that you are interested in them, they may actually take a moment to listen to you. Some tips to recognize each customer:

• Add their first name at the beginning of emails
• Respond to a customer tweet with an original, authentic response (not a complaint tweet, but a random tweet)
• Encourage customer support to begin customer interactions with a personal greeting, instead of asking for the customer’s ID or username
• Follow up with customers after their purchase with a personal phone call
• Stay in touch with customers with personalized emails and customers surveys to monitor their satisfaction level

Marketers tend to spend a lot of time on leading a prospect toward the purchasing decision and a lot less time nurturing current customers. These tips will help you increase both efforts and personalize the processes while you’re at it to better satisfy your customers.

Be Responsive

Marketers have recently started to take the approach of creating dynamic content for individual campaigns. This means that each campaign is set up for a specific set of prospects. The campaign has its very own landing page, social media posts, email series, literature, video, and so on. Each piece of collateral is created for a specific audience to best suit who is on the receiving end.

Websites are beginning to be set up similarly. Companies ahead of the game are offering customized content for each audience and responsive design. This means that each target audience will have different messaging and call-to-action and that the website will be responsive depending on the device each particular audience typically uses. All of this results in increased engagement.

Personalization is here to stay. It is the future of marketing. Marketers are using predictive marketing to identify what product a customer needs before the customer even does, instead of advertising to the masses, brands are promoting only to the audiences that have shown or have the interest, and companies are reducing automation in order to maintain a personal touch.

Personalization is the ultimate gift to your customers. It is all about convenience and offering customers what they desire at the right time. When content is customized, your customers feel as if you can read their minds and in hand, as if they have a relationship with your company and brand.