Creating reliable frameworks

Co-founder and CEO of Spektrix, Michael Nabarro, on why you need to segment, refine and repeat in order to achieve dependable marketing results.

Strong, well-defined audience segments are essential to successful communications and marketing in the arts. But how do you ensure that your segmentation is working? How can you prove that the way you target your marketing activities to different groups actually impacts on how engaged they are with your organisation? Having a reliable framework for testing and refining segments can help you answer this question confidently, while ensuring that your marketing budget is always spent as wisely as possible.

Thanks are due to Katy Raines at Indigo Ltd for introducing me to this model, which is simple in principle:

  •  Put quality data in
  •  Analyse it in the right way to create segments.
  •  Experiment with something new
  •  Measure the results of your experiment and then resegment based on what you found.

 

Of course, refining segments in this way comes with some unavoidable risk. You will need to devote some resources to experimental campaigns that might not work, and you risk losing some of your audience by trying out untested marketing activities on them. However, approach this in a structured fashion, and you can minimise the risks and learn much more about your audiences in the process.

Full article Vol 12 / Issue 5 of IAM.