A whopping 99% of marketers say that personalization helps them advance customer relationships. Many of these professionals use audience segmentation to deliver that targeted personalization. But a smaller number use UTM parameter tracking, and a very small minority uses both UTM parameter tracking and audience segmentation, despite the many benefits of doing so.
We created this article to reveal why you should be using UTM parameter tracking and audience segmentation together and how to do it.
How audience segmentation works
If you’re not familiar with it, audience segmentation is a marketing strategy that seeks to identify subgroups within a target audience and then serve those subgroups more personalized marketing content.
You might sell financial software and realize that a certain segment of your audience is primarily interested in meeting their obligations under a specific governmental regulation.
You could define the group members and then deliver marketing content that focuses on how your software can help them meet their obligations.
The key is to get more sales out of your marketing efforts if you use more personalized strategies. That’s an idea that’s backed by data, as 80% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy something from brands when they offer personalized experiences.
Different types of segmentation
There are several different types of audience segmentation that are worth exploring. Each of the following could help your company generate more leads online.
Geographic
Geographic segmentation involves splitting your audience into groups based on their location. This can be effective for companies that sell geographic-dependent products, such as houses and weather-related gear.
But geographic segmentation may not be the right strategy for you if your products don’t offer different benefits to people in other geographic areas.
Demographic
You can also segment your audience based on demographic factors. These include age, income level, education, and gender, just to name a few.
Psychographic
Psychographic segmentation is about splitting your audience based on how they see the world. This could include their beliefs, religious background, lifestyle, or social status, among other factors.
Behavioral
Behavioral segmentation involves grouping your audience based on behavior they’ve exhibited in the past. For example, the most common way brands use this type of segmentation is to split their audience based on how they’ve previously interacted with their website.
Using UTM parameter tracking to identify website visitors
How it works
UTM parameter tracking involves using a unique HTML tag to track and customize a user’s journey across your website. It’s a tool that lets you split users into groups based on factors like:
- How they get to your website
- How they interacted with it
- The marketing campaign they responded to
- The SEO keyword they interacted with
How UTM parameter tracking enables personalized marketing
UTM parameter tracking opens up new possibilities for personalized marketing. You can use it to do things like:
- Create individual pathways to purchase
- Serve up customized blog content
- Recommend the most relevant products and services
- Customize the special deals you offer
It becomes even more powerful when you combine it with audience segmentation strategies.
Combining UTM parameter tracking and audience segmentation to generate more leads
Both UTM parameter tracking and audience segmentation can be effective marketing strategies on their own. But using them together could help you get even better results out of your marketing budget.
If you’re interested in trying this, here are four strategies you can use to get started.
Create UTM parameters based on audience segments
It’s good to begin this process by creating specific audience segments that you’d like to target. Once you’ve done that, you can create UTM parameters that help you keep track of those users as they navigate your website.
This can give you a ton of insight into your audience segments that you might not have had otherwise. For instance, you might discover an overlap in interest between members of two seemingly distinct segments. Uncovering this linkage could influence you to recommend a category of products to another audience segment you might not have otherwise.
Use website tracking software to get more information from visitors
If you can identify website visitors more effectively, it becomes much easier to serve them personalized marketing content through channels like email and social media.
That’s why it’s a good idea to invest in website tracking software if you want to start combining the power of UTM parameter tracking and audience segmentation. It can give you a wealth of information about who’s visiting your website and how they’re interacting with it.
When you combine that information with the results you get from segmentation and UTMs, you can start getting ultra-precise with marketing content across the entire internet. The net result could be a dramatic increase in the results you get with the same marketing budget.
Change your homepage based on audience segments
UTM parameter tracking gives you the data to serve up different versions of your website based on what you know about a user. You can combine this with the information from audience segmentation to achieve impressive results.
You might have an audience segment that only cares about one of the things your software can do. Then you could use UTM parameters to identify the audience members and create a new version of your homepage that highlights that benefit.
Serve personalized marketing materials across multiple channels
If you’re going to invest the time and energy that it takes to start using audience segmentation with UTMs, you want to make sure you’re taking advantage of in every way possible.
Focus on using the data you get across multiple channels. Don’t limit the impact of your personalization to just your website or your emails. Instead, take the data you get and use it to create marketing content across every channel in your broader strategy to ensure you’re getting the most out of it.
Selecting the right type of personalization for your brand
This article has highlighted numerous strategies for personalizing how you market your company. But even the most ambitious brands don’t use every personalization strategy available; doing so would be too costly and time-consuming.
So, how do you pick which types are right for you? Here are three factors to consider while deciding on the right personalization strategies to pursue.
Understand your customers
Perhaps the most important step in choosing your personalization strategy is understanding who your customers are and why they’re interacting with your brand in the first place.
If you have a good sense of this, then engaging with those customers becomes more obvious. You can build your personalization strategy around the unique desires and goals of different segments of your audience and avoid strategies that don’t help you achieve your goals.
Know your goals
It’s also important to clearly understand what you hope to achieve with a personalized marketing strategy. Are there specific products that you want to sell more of? Or perhaps you want to increase the overall number of people who visit your website.
Understanding your goals should give you a clearer sense of the types of marketing personalization that will help you reach your audience more efficiently.
Try different strategies and track your results
Ultimately, you may not identify the optimal personalization strategies for your brand right away. That’s why it’s essential to track your results over time. It’s the only way to truly identify whether a strategy is helping you enough to make it worth pursuing.
LeadLander’s website tracking software makes it easier to find and convert leads
Ultimately, UTM parameter tracking and audience segmentation are worth using because they can help you find and convert more leads. But they’re certainly not the only way to achieve that end.
LeadLander’s software presents the web data your site generates intuitively, and it’s much easier for your team to work with. It also helps you unlock hidden insights that you may not be taking advantage of. Sign up for a risk-free trial of LeadLander today. Doing so could be just what you need to unlock the full potential of UTM parameter tracking and audience segmentation.
