Digital Marketing Segmentation for the Education Industry

When it comes to education and higher education in particular, it is tempting to view the student community as a homogeneous mass. The traditional approach has been that all students are the same and that the same motivation – acquiring a good education – motivates them. However, increasingly, this is not the case.

What is more important is to understand why students are interested in education. What do they expect to get out of it? What purpose drives their efforts? When marketers explore mindsets to define the right approach, it makes for more relevant targeting and positioning. This is diametrically opposite to the old technique of listing out all the features and benefits that an institution offers prospective students. This may or may not be relevant to all kinds of students.

Coming to the kinds of students, as mentioned earlier, they are no longer a homogeneous mass. This is where a dated, yet still relevant report by the Parthenon Group (currently a part of Ernst & Young LLC) throws some light on segmentation in the higher education sector.

Titled “The Differentiated University”, this report separates students into six distinct and defined segments based on their motivations and mindsets rather than just demographics. These segments include:

• Aspiring academics
• Coming of age
• Career starters
• Career accelerators
• Industry switchers and
• Academic wanderers

The details of the various segments, as defined in the report are as follows:

Aspiring Academics - 24%

The Aspiring Academics are the segment most similar to the picture of the “traditional student” that most colleges are so aggressively seeking to serve. They are 18-to-24-year-olds with impressive academic profiles, and often come from wealthier families. They are academically driven with plans to go to graduate school, so the availability of a specific major and the presence of top-notch research faculty are valued by this group. While this segment is the largest of the segments found in the survey, it remains only a quarter of the market.

Coming of Age - 11%

A second, smaller group of traditional-aged students, the Coming of Age segment, is not yet sure what they want to focus on when they “grow up,” but have the luxury of taking the time to figure it out. These students are less academically driven than Young Academics and place little value on research opportunities, research faculty, or graduate school offerings. For them, college is about broad academic offerings, an active social culture, and trying a variety of activities without knowing exactly where it will lead.

Career Starters - 18%

These Career Starters are extremely job oriented and use college to advance their specific career prospects. These students are focused on life after college, and are looking for a college that enables them to reach their ideal career position in the shortest amount of time. Career Starters are one of the more price-sensitive segments and value job placement rate and career placement services in making their college selection.

Career Accelerator - 21%

Typically older, Career Accelerators are going to college with the aim of advancing their career at their company or within their current industry. These are primarily working adults with some prior college experience and are likely to be most interested in institutions that award credit for their previous academic experience, as well as their job experience. These students value non-traditional delivery methods, particularly online courses. Career counseling and career placement services are strongly desired by this group.

Industry Switchers - 18%

While in many ways similar to Career Accelerators, Industry Switchers have a different motivation for going back to school to earn their bachelor’s degree. Often in more precarious financial positions or unemployed, this segment is looking to start a career in a completely different field. Industry Switchers place a high value on an institution’s link to labor markets and its ability to put them in touch with relevant employers and prepare them for their career transition.

Academic Wanderers - 8%

Students attending college later in life, Academic Wanderers don’t know exactly what they want out of college, but believe that obtaining a college credential will open doors for them. They are more likely to be unemployed and potentially have lower incomes. Academic Wanderers are the most “at risk” of the student segments. They are the least satisfied with their college experience, do not place high importance on their academic performance, and are the least likely to believe they will complete their degree.

These segments have been created with a specific focus on undergraduate students. However, the way they are defined leaves a lot of scope for usage across all kinds of student communities. This approach allows college and university leaders to develop more sophisticated strategies for reaching the next generation of students with offerings and operating models to most effectively and efficiently serve them.

Fundamentally, all students are interested in the same thing – an education. But digging a bit deeper can help marketers understand the specific reasons why. The real motivations are what help one determine what students expect to get out of the educational institution can go a long way in helping marketers build brand relevance.

The Differentiated University complete report can be accessed here.

Digital Marketing Segmentation | Defining Personas

One of the tools that present-day marketers use to help with segmentation is what is known as ‘Personas’. Market segments are based on broad commonalities of a particular audience. These may include demographic data, psychographic data and behavioral data among a host of other things. From a strategic standpoint, they are really useful in identifying which part of the overall audience is worth going after.

In order to determine the how, we need to develop suitable personas. Personas are highly-specific representations of the actual individuals who make up a particular marketing segment. Think of them as a representative individual who is ‘personified’ – giving marketers the ability to predict behavior, usage and reactions.

Although segments are strategic in nature and personas are more tactical, they both share one goal – helping you understand your customers so you can market to them better! When your segments are well researched and clearly defined, they will result in the creation of better personas.

The origin of personas

Personas originated in the field of programming and user experience design. The practitioners of these fields needed a way to better understand how typical users of the products they designed would understand and work with them to resolve actual problems. Otherwise, the product/experience design team was likely to get carried away with ‘cool’ ideas that did nothing to add value to the lives of the intended users. All form and no functionality would result in an interesting but largely-unused product!

Visualizing the ideal persona

Whatever data you choose to include in your persona, remember to visualize how that persona would look. It is helpful to include some personal information about the persona as that humanizes it rather than making it a statistics-filled demographic drone.

For example: Think of your audience as “Fresh Graduate in his first full-time job with an active social life who gyms thrice-a-week” rather than “18 to 24 year old male who has just started working”. While both attribute statements are likely to define the target audience, the former is more personal and offers you a way to connect with the audience. The latter just spews facts at you.

Another example: Thinking of your persona in terms of “Middle-aged family man with two teenaged kids and home-maker wife who is paying for a housing loan and a car loan but is keen on a foreign vacation for the family”, will provide more insights into financial product selection motivations rather than “Salaried male 34 to 45, seeking personal loan”. You get the picture!

No matter how you choose to go about defining your audience persona, remember one thing. Personas exist in the minds of the marketer – not the minds of the audience themselves. Every member of the audience would like to view themselves as unique individuals with a custom set of circumstances and motives. So try to be a tad objective with persona definition rather than making it painfully specific. After all, the objective behind creating personas is to enable you to reach out to a reasonably similar audience with reasonably similar motivations!

Digital Marketing Segmentation | Audience Attributes

When it comes to segmentation – whatever be your audience – attributes are a key way of gaining a better understanding your target. Attributes are nothing but quantifiable characteristics and provide a way for marketers to understand the needs and motivations behind audience behavior.

Attributes can broadly be classified under the following buckets:

Personal attributes – What people are

These are attributes that tell us what people really are. They mostly pertain to demographic data like age, gender, household income, marital status etc. A secondary level of attributes may indicate life-stages as well. Things like graduation, wedding day, birth of child etc can indicate the current shift in personal attributes and may have repercussions on choice of product/services.

Behavioral attributes – What people do

Behavioral attributes are mostly observed. What media does the target audience consume most? What kinds of products do they typically buy? What online sources of information are consulted? What kind of content is most consumed on social media channels? This gives us very usable information on where they are and what they do while they are there. Marketers can use this information to create compelling content to cater to audience requirements.

Attitudinal attributes – What people think

Attitudinal attributes comes in two distinct types. Some are explicit when people clearly know what they think and feel about a topic. However, human being being what they are, some others are rather implicit. People may often not realize what they feel about a particular topic till they are confronted with a specific situation. In such cases, the attitudinal attributes have to be inferred from available data.

Once these different attributes have been gathered and analyzed, they can be applied to segments. When customer segments are mapped to needs/values clustering, insights will begin to emerge. This helps marketers identify things like the right price point, the ideal segment to target, the most compelling message, the most valuable customer, the trigger for behavioral change, the way to pitch product information etc. This informs the creative process which leads to better conversions and hence sales.

Digital Marketing Segmentation | How to Segment?

In a previous post we discussed “Why to Segment?” Today, we will look at some practical ways we can go about segmenting our audiences. There are two primary ways we can go about doing this.

1. Strategic Segmentation

Strategic Segmentation looks at groups of customers and tries to identify insights which will help in one of the following:

a) Targeting

What kind of a customer can be targeted? If it is an existing customer, is the customer happy or unhappy with the products and services of the company? If happy, is there the possibility of cross or up-selling? If unhappy, is the customer at risk of switching to a competitor? Is the customer worth retaining? Being able to segment and target audiences in this manner makes for more efficient processes and better customer service.

b) Messaging

Messaging tries to address the specific content that each of the identified audiences is currently seeking. For instance, those who have just stumbled across your product or service are probably interested in knowing more about you and your offering. While those who are already aware of what you offer will be more interested in the exact details of what’s on offer.

c) Product Development

Are your customer needs satisfied by your current product offerings? What else are customers seeking? What proportion of your customer base could benefit from those enhancements? What is the feasibility of offering those services? What does it take in terms of time and development effort? What could the resultant revenue be to the company? Segmenting on these lines makes use of listening to customer issues to enhance product features.

For a related post, see 3 types of “Do-it” Customer Segments

2. Tactical Segmentation

Tactical segmentations on the other hand is more interested in segmenting users by the likelihood (or not) of their buying a particular product or service. For example, people searching for particular recipes could be segmented and targeted to purchase a specific ingredient by a food manufacturer. Or those looking at Housing or Real Estate websites could be target by a bank for a Housing Loan. Alternatively those looking at comparison and aggregator websites for interest rate information could be up/cross-sold suitable products by BFSI marketers.

When the Strategic and Tactical Segments are mapped to Customers and Prospects (Who to segment?) you can develop a right framework that helps position your products and services most effectively.

The 3 types of "Do-it" customer segments

In any planning endeavor, be it a vacation planning or a tax planning, three distinct types of customer segments manifest themselves. Do remember that segments are not in the minds of the customers themselves. Every customer chooses to believe that they are unique and that their wants, needs, aspirations and usage habits are unique as well. One reason for this could be the ego inherent in every human action. Another could be the lack of data to help them see themselves as part of a group or bucket.

Be that as it may, segmentation is largely a marketers’ tool to help them evaluate the buying journey and devise mindful interventions. This post looks at the 3 types of Do-it customer segments commonly found online.

1. Do-it-myself segment

These individuals prefer to do their tasks themselves. Whether it is a home improvement project, information gather exercise, trip planning or even tax planning. They have the patience and the ability to scour the Internet for information and the ability to sift through it all to learn how to do this by themselves! Such individuals are self-motivated and driven to seek out relevant information and to act upon it. They may not necessarily be cash-poor but definitely have the time to dedicate themselves to information gathering and sifting through.

2. Do-it-with-me segment

These individuals exhibit some of the characteristics of the Do-it-myself segment, but only up to a point. Post this, they get so overwhelmed by the information and options presented by the research process that they prefer to have a helping hand. While they are great at initiating things, they are not so good at finishing it by themselves. They often require a bit of help and motivation at the second leg of the journey to successfully complete the process. These individuals may be a combination of time-poor and cash-poor.

3. Do-it-for-me segment

These individuals could not be bothered with doing it by themselves. They either consider it beneath them or could not be bothered with it as they prefer spending time on more important things (according to them). They are the ones who typically outsource the entire process and prefer to pay for the service offered rather than spend any time or effort in trying to learn it for themselves. These are typically time-poor but cash rich individuals. They may not be driven individuals when it comes to their online habits and information needs and may merely essay a purely transactional role.

Once you have identified the different segments and understood their unique needs and motivations, it becomes much simpler to address them on digital channels. We wil dive deeper into that with another post.

Digital Marketing Segmentation | Why to segment?

There is absolutely no worse reason to segment than that everyone else is doing so. If you haven’t understood why segmentation is important for your business, then you probably are far, far away from the need for segmentation itself.

The simplistic rationale that all customers are different is not sufficient to warrant digital segmentation. You rather need to consider a number of thing to figure out for yourself if 1) your business is ready for segmentation and 2) whether you can realistically segment your customers and prospects?

They easiest way to do this is to start with defining your goals. The first thing about goal-setting is that it is entirely different for your customers and your prospects.

Customers

Your customers already know about you and probably communicate with you through digital channels. As a result you probably have a wealth of available information on their preferences, their behavior, habits etc. Good data sources would be website analytics, CRM data, POS data etc.

For existing users of your website, the goal could be to enhance the usability and ease-of-use of the website or other digital channels. Is the user experience simple enough? Is it effective at converting leads to customers? Are the calls-to-action compelling enough?

For existing customers, it could be enhancing customer experience or retention. This supposes that you are able to attract a greater share of wallet from your competitors for similar products or services.

Prospects

These are people who are likely to benefit from your product or service but as a marketer, you don’t have any primary sources of data about them. This is where you try and find about more about through access to external data sources. Some good places to start include syndicated data, third-party publisher data, market research data, government data etc.

Prospects who contribute to the growth of your business typically take the form of leads that you generate. These are individuals who have expressed an interest or inclination regarding your product or service and constitute those you know will benefit from it.

Prospects who contribute to product or service expansion are those whose needs are currently unmet by your product or service, but those you know would benefit from a differentiated one that you can offer in the future.

In another post, we will take a look at how you can strategically and tactically address your customers and prospects through digital segmentation.

Digital Marketing Segmentation | Who to segment?

With all these conversations about digital segmentation it is probably likely that marketers are in a bit of a rush to get back to their desks and segment the heck out of their customer databases. But hang on for a minute. The fundamental purpose of segmenting is to find that portion of your audience that is actually stable, addressable and unique enough to warrant reward with preferential treatment.

Confused? You shouldn’t be. Let us take that statement and analyze it. There are three key factors we need to look at:

Stable

Is the segment you have identified stable enough? What this means is that if you have segmented well, that particular segment should remain consistent for the foreseeable future. With all the rapid changes that social media creates in user behavior, it is clearly not likely that any user behavior will remain the same forever. But at least for the foreseeable future, your segment should be viable.

Addressable

There is no point in defining a segment, even a stable one, if there is now way that you can reach out to and communicate with that segment! The second most important consideration for a usable segmentation strategy is to figure out addressable segments. Do the members of the segment exhibit preference for one channel of communication over the other? If so, what about that channel appeals to them? Immediacy? Frequency? Figure this out and you will be set to communicate to them.

Unique enough to warrant reward

Is your segment all about figuring out your most valuable customers? Or is it people who have the potential to be your most valuable customers? Basically are they unique (and important enough) to warrant rewarding them with preferential treatment? This is really important. If you are going to spend time, effort and money in trying to reach out to and communicate with a particular segment, they better be worth it! Targeting the “unconvertables” is not only an exercise in futility – it is a misuse of the segmentation process itself!

In the next post, we will take a look at the step-by-step process involved in setting up the right goals to help you segment meaningfully.