Delivering Contextual Relevance Through Segmentation

Mass marketing in the digital age means marketing to many segments of the entire mass. In fact, we all know the very idea of “mass marketing” is road kill. Technology allows us as marketers to understand the individual segments of our audience and deliver messages contextually relevant to each segment. In fact, segmentation is the strategic cornerstone of relevance and thus optimization.

Leveraging the power of data and technology for optimization will have a huge impact for your campaigns. Careful data analysis and test design also provides long-term value in the form of business intelligence, facilitating a window to the latent needs of the market. Over the past year, agencies and businesses alike have begun to use optimization and analytics for marketing in ways they never have and never could before, with outstanding results. Nowhere is the strategy becoming more prevalent than with the landing page.

Since about half of all online ad dollars go into paid search, landing page optimization can reap tremendous rewards. The very nature of search marketing affords us the opportunity to deliver contextual relevance in ways that were unimaginable to marketers just a decade ago. Also, these search-focused strategies transfer to other forms of user-controlled media or pull marketing, which should be gaining more attention in your marketing plans.

So that I may deliver contextual relevance myself, here are a few basic landing page optimization examples (in the guise of a clothing retailer) of delivering contextual relevance based on high-impact segmentation:

Keyword – If the visitor’s search query included color specificity the product landing page will display the color match product image and have supporting copy for the color that matches the user query.

Geo – It’s the middle of January. As a clothing retailer I show down jackets and snow boots on my homepage to users from Maine however I show polo shirts and loafers to my users from Florida.

Referrer – Visitors from the comparative shopping engines will land on product pages optimized with additional product options matching their category interest since these visitors are likely still in the consideration phase.

Stage – A customer that purchased shoes will be shown socks and belts should they return to the homepage within 30 days of their purchase. Should they return after the season changes (if they live in a seasonal climate) they’ll be show the season’s newest shoes.

An often-overlooked one…

Language – My visitor used a Spanish language search query or came from a Spanish language site deliver so her landing page will be in Spanish.

After you’ve discovered the high impact segment you want to optimize that’s when the fun begins. Through the wonder of JavaScript (the bedrock for most of the next-generation web applications), delivering relevant messages through targeted content delivery on your landing pages as exemplified above can be implemented quickly and easily. As a digital marketer you will be able to wrestle control of content delivery away from the IT department and bring it where it belongs, your marketing department and your agency. Now that’s some very relevant segmentation indeed.