Market segmentation is a marketing strategy which involves dividing a broad target market into subsets of consumers, businesses, or countries who have, or are perceived to have, common needs, interests, and priorities, and then designing and implementing strategies to target them. Market segmentation strategies are generally used to identify and further define the target customers, and provide supporting data for marketing plan elements such as positioning to achieve certain marketing plan objectives. Businesses may develop product differentiation strategies, or an undifferentiated approach, involving specific products or product lines depending on the specific demand and attributes of the target segment. – Wikipedia
An exercise in market segmentation can beam new light into your development efforts. Specifically, analyzing cohorts or market segments can tell you which customers value which features and so on. With data in hand you can better target grassroots efforts, meet ups and content marketing. A market segmentation analysis is also useful to make your user base more diverse.
If, for example, you wish to acquire more teenagers to use your app, theres a simple process to attain your goal. Set up a number of reports in MixPanel or Google Analytics and count the most visited pages and most used features of that existing user base. Then go to QuantCast and type in one of your traffic referrers.
Type in a site that your audience would use and start discovering their levels of engagement in that web property.
Keep scrolling thru the Quantcast report and stop by the audience interest section. Here you will find something called “affinity index”, which is basically a comparative metric that gives an idea of the engagement your audience has which each site. This is a very powerful process you can use to discover and target high-engagement web properties to drive fresh traffic to your site. Now use the first report to create a handful of ads drawing attention to the features your audience wants to use. Rotate them and discover the best converting ones.
Rinse and repeat the Quantcast hack to find more and more websites were you can capture your audience while advertising at a very low cost.
About Quantcast
Quantcast is a technology company, founded in 2006, that specializes in audience measurement and real-time advertising. The company offers public access to traffic and demographic data for millions of Web sites and detailed user insights to digital publishers enrolled in its Quantified Publisher Program. Their data centers process more than 800,000 transactions per second and the company states that it produces accurate audience measurement to over 100 million web destinations. As of 2013 it was said to be one of the world’s top five big data processing organizations along with SimilarWeb, Alexa Internet, Compete.com and comScore. Its headquarters is in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Chicago, London and Dublin.
About Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a business analytics service and company. It tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and offers tools for targeted communication with them. Its toolset contains in-app A/B tests and user survey forms. Collected data is used to build custom reports and measure user engagement and retention Mix panel works with web applications, in particular SaaS, but also supports mobile apps.As of April 2013, Mixpanel claimed to track 48 billion actions per month for its customers.