We all know that in the age of the digital consumer, your brand’s target audience could be global. Marketing personalization is just as much about celebrating the differences between your consumers as it is about finding common ground between them. Geographic segmentation is how you can manage the best of both worlds, and delight your customers with highly relevant content and campaigns.
What is geographic segmentation?
Geographic segmentation is the process of categorizing your audience based on location, starting as macro as their continent and getting granular enough to distinguish between postal codes. There are six factors of geographic segmentation:
Six Types of Geographic Data:
- Location (country, state, city, ZIP code)
- Timezone
- Climate and season
- Cultural preferences
- Language
- Population type and density (urban, suburban, exurban or rural)
Why is geographic data important?
Geographic data is an effective way of appealing to consumers with targeted content and promotions for their region. As a national clothing & apparel retailer (in the U.S.), the ads you run in the southwest region of the U.S. during the summer should be different from the ads and content you push in the northeast.
Your marketing budget is able to stretch more when you offer relevant content, products, and promotions to the people who are ready to act on your suggestions. Promoting a new line of sweat-wicking, light fabric athletic apparel in the dead of a Canadian winter isn’t going to bring you the results you are looking for. Being thoughtful about your analysis of geographic data will ultimately help you increase your marketing ROI.
Another perk of geographic segmentation is that geography is one easy aspect of personalization that can be done for web visitors that do not share their data with you—all you need is their IP address.
Examples of Geographic Segmentation:
The first example of geographic segmentation is a controversial one; many consumers believe that using geographic data is a little too intrusive. But using someone’s physical location, you can recommend their nearest store or send them a personalized offer as they are walking by. You can also tailor your content to the cultural preferences of that region. For example, as a food and beverage brand, you can offer kosher or halal variations in stores that serve areas where these preferences are common.
Climate is another lucrative way to personalize based on geographic data—if your products offer unique value to different regions. Let’s say you work for a hair care brand: depending on the season or hemisphere, you can push anti-frizz products to different user bases. Those in humid climates might benefit from different promotions year-round, whereas consumers in a more varied climate might only purchase these products during spring or summer.
Lastly, let’s explore how you can personalize using language data: one of the CPG food brands that we work with has Breinify set up to automatically detect the preferred browsing language of the website visitor, and serve up recipes in that language.
Like all types of data, geographic data is an extremely useful way to understand your consumer and cater to their needs. Segmentation by geography or physical location enables personalization that demonstrates care and concern for the consumer.
