Segmenting Your Audience

Segmentation is a useful tool to help you refine your audience via a deeper understanding of their health behaviours and can greatly improve the way you communicate with them.

Key Tips

MOTIVATIONS - Move beyond simple demographic and clinical outcome information. Learn the 'why' & 'what' of a group rather than the 'who' & 'where'.
DIFFERENT ANGLE - People are much more than their age, their location or their BMI. Consider other ways that you can segment your audience based on their attitudes, values and behaviours to the health area that your work focuses on. Identifying a Health Behaviour Theory can help you work out the angles or perspectives for your chosen audience.
RESEARCH - Engage members of your audience to help you learn their motivations and psychographic influences. Even a conversation with an audience member can give you valuable information about what motivates them, and what doesn’t. This collaborative approach is known as co-creation.
SHIFT - Target your communication by adapting your approach and messaging based on audience profiles.
USE RESOURCES - Save yourself time by using publicly available audience research that you can access and use to better understand your audience. Check with your professional association or governing body for resources and use available research such as the Living and Eating for Health segments.

What is Segmentation?

Segmentation is an antidote to the usually unsuccessful one-size-fits-all approaches.

It is based on the notion that individuals have different needs, preferences, and motivations to behave.

Therefore, different segments require different approaches to communications and interventions in order to persuade them to change or adopt behaviours.

Traditional segmentation groups people by their demographics (e.g. age, gender, socio-economic status) or location (e.g. city, neighbourhood, institution).

However, to really gain beneficial insights for targeted communications, behavioural and psychographic segmentation is the most useful tool.

Rather than grouping people based on demographics and geography, or even clinical outcomes (e.g. BMI and disease states), behavioural and psychographic segmentation groups people based on factors such as:

This method gives you the ‘why’ and ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’ and ‘where’.

This deeper audience segmentation aims to understand the different motivations, preferences and needs of an audience and then uses targeted approaches to communicate to different groups.

There are no pre-determined or set segments that you are aiming to fit your audience into. The group you choose as your audience will deliver a unique set of segments. You label the segments yourself to best suit your communication needs.

An example of segmentation is in this case study in which we segmented a young audience regarding food motivations.

Use regular research to gain insight into your audience to help you segment. Even a conversation with an audience member/client can give you valuable information about what motivates them, and what doesn’t.

Methods to segment your audience include:

Interview

Simply a conversation with an audience member
A more planned & structured interview of an invited person or people

Online Survey

Sent to current clients/mailing list
Sent to a wider shared list from an aligned organisation, e.g. a school, community group, another practitioner, etc.

Workshop

Recruit a small group of people for a few hours to brainstorm and interview

Online Poll

Like a mini survey using social media

To help with your planning, here is a downloadable quick reference guide summary of the information on this page.

Where to next? - Case Study: Living and Eating for Health Segments or Planning or to helpful resources linked below

Links & Resources

Population & demographic insights - https://home.id.com.au/demographic-resources/
This is an example survey we used to segment the research audience into the LEHS. You can use it as a guide or template for making your own survey.

How To's & Tutorials

Creating polls on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/lessons/post-polls
Twitter polls - https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-polls
Free online survey app - https://www.surveymonkey.com/ (scroll to the bottom of the Survey Monkey homepage to 'Use Cases' to see many tutorials on different applications of polls & surveys)
LinkedIn polls - https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/119595/create-linkedin-polls?lang=en
5 of the Best Social Media Poll Apps - https://www.supermonitoring.com/blog/best-social-media-poll-apps/
How to Create Polls & Quizzes on Social Media - https://follows.com/blog/2016/08/how-create-quizzes-polls
Market research interview templates - https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/market-research-survey-templates/

Behaviour data

The VicHealth website has a number of resources, reports and case studies that give insights into the behaviours of different audiences. Check out the 'Resources' section at https://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au

Publications

Beyond Body Weight: Design and Validation of Psycho-Behavioural Living and Eating for Health Segments (LEHS) Profiles for Social Marketing (by Brennan, L., Chin, S., Molenaar, A., Barklamb, AM., Lim, MS., Reid, M., Truby, H., Jenkins, EL., McCaffrey, TA.) in the journal Nutrients. (2020)

A social marketing perspective of young adults' concepts of eating for health: is it a question of morality? (by Brennan, L., Klassen, K., Weng, E. et al.) in the journal International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (2020).

Psycho-behavioural segmentation in food and nutrition: A scoping review of the literature (by Jenkins, EL., & Legrand, S., Brennan, L., Molenaar, A., Reid, M., McCaffrey, TA.) in the journal Nutrients (2021)

The use of social media as a persuasive platform to facilitate nutrition and health behavior change in young adults: web-based conversation study (by Friedman V, Wright C, Molenaar A, McCaffrey T, Brennan L, Lim M) in the journal Journal of Medical Internet Research (2022)

Social Marketing & Advertising in the Age of Social Media (book) - by Parker, L. & Brennan, L. (eds) (2020)

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