The Power of Segmenting and Why Specificity Matters: Introducing Segment Comparison

Segmenting is a core strategy that is crucial to any marketer’s success. As not all customers have the same characteristics or behave in the same manner, it’s increasingly important to employ different marketing tactics for each distinct group. While traditionally segmenting has been thought about quite simply in regards to age, gender and even geography – as our threshold for data-driven marketing continues to increase, the definition of segmenting has shifted as well.

Let’s use Pixar movies as an example: while one might think that their cartoons are just geared to children, in reality their movies appeal to a variety of different groups including kids, parents, couples, teenagers. The messaging and movie promotion go far beyond just simply getting a five-year old to laugh. Pixar is smart in their approach: aside from traditional advertisements on children’s programming, the movie is also positioned on shows geared towards adults such as Ellen (as they did with Finding Dory), and promoted on social channels with specific storylines that are geared toward a group.

With the massive amount of customer and behavior data at our disposal, it’s even more important to identify the key characteristics of audience segments that are most significant to a brand – to better understand the behavior that drives more positive interaction, sharing and conversions among different groups of customers.

At Adobe Summit, we introduced Segment IQ to the world – and we’re now excited to announce the first live feature within that category: Segment Comparison for Analysis Workspace. First in a series of audience analysis and discovery tools within Segment IQ, Segment Comparison intelligently discovers the differences between your sets of target audience segments through automated analysis of all your metrics and dimensions.

In speaking with customers, we saw analysts spending an incredible amount of time comparing various segments with each other in order to understand the actionable differences between them. Segments often overlap with each other or have non-obvious differences lurking deep within the data, and uncovering these insights is like picking a needle out of a haystack – sifting through these cascades of data manually to find the most significant differences is often impossible.

With Segment Comparison, marketers and analysts can gain new visibility into which segments are most important to their businesses and why, so they can acquire and convert customers much more efficiently—saving time and budget.

The best part is that all of this is done with a few clicks of a mouse. Check out this short demo to see it in action.

Segment Comparison allows brands to complete a comprehensive segment analysis within just minutes, and compare every single dimension, metric or data point between any two segments automatically discovering the most significant differences between each. In initial testing with customers, Segment IQ is one of the most popular features we’ve released, and we’re thrilled to see how it expands from here in helping to create highly targeted marketing strategies that resonate with segments based on customers’ unique behavior.