18 Steps for Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is a process of identifying groups of people within a larger population with similar beliefs, behaviours, political ideology that are most relevant to the objectives of the campaign. Audience segmentation research – if conducted insightfully – provides organizations with an important strategic planning asset: information about how best to focus the organization’s limited resources, both human and financial, to advance its objectives. For example, a smaller audience segment whose members are willing to behave in ways sought by the organization may be a more productive target than a larger, less predisposed audience segment.

Audience segmentation is a key aspect of achieving the objectives of the campaign or the organization as a whole. Knowing whom to target and how to target them helps create the reach you need to create a proactive response when applying it to a SDG.

How to Conduct the Audience Survey

1. Identify the problem or issues to be addressed by the survey

Take a moment to determine what your organization is attempting to achieve. Think of the SDG, Sustainable Development Goal, you are attempting to highlight and help.

2. Formulate survey objectives

The survey objective might be to determine the media habits and perceptions, knowledge, and practices in environmental protection of farm families. Drawing up a list of variables that will help find answers to the survey objectives could put the researcher on the right track in designing the questions to ask in the survey. Specific questions that are aimed at various aspects of the problem could help clarify the research problem.

3. Develop the survey instrument

In a survey, a popular instrument used for data collection is a questionnaire that contains a series of questions designed to gather information from the respondents. The survey questionnaire may contain questions on the demographics of respondents, their communication access and exposure, knowledge, attitude and practice questions on an identified problem, among others.

4. Pretest the questionnaire

When the survey questionnaire has been compiled, it needs to be translated into the local language and pretested before being reproduced and used in the field. Pretesting involves interviewing a small group of respondents who are similar to the intended target group to determine their reactions to the prototype questionnaire. The pretest is a screening of the questionnaire to see how it works and whether changes are necessary before the start of the actual survey.

5. Choose sample respondents

An important concern in survey research is deciding how many and which respondents should be included. An audience analysis survey uses standard social science methods in selecting the sample, e.g., multi-stage sampling, stratified sampling, systematic sampling, cluster sampling, and simple random sampling. The choice of sampling technique depends primarily on the nature of the problem, the cost and time factors involved, and the desired precision or reliability of the results. It is recommended that the sample be drawn from a cross-section of the sampling population so that this group can be said to represent the larger population.

6. Implement the field survey

When the questionnaire has been pretested, finalized and reproduced, the next step is to implement the field survey. Before they are fielded, interviewers are oriented on the purpose of the survey and trained on interviewing skills and how to conduct the interviews. Guided by the sampling plan and respondent list, the interviewers locate the respondents, conduct the interviews, and check the completed questionnaires after the interview.

7. Code and analyze survey data

Once the completed questionnaires have been edited, the data need to be analyzed. Depending on the main objective of the survey, this analysis phase can be relatively simple – such as manually determining the % of respondents giving specific answers or listing the various ways in which farmers said they might utilize a new practice. For more complex surveys, particularly where the aim is to predict for the entire population from the results of the sample population, it is best that the data are encoded, processed and analyzed using a statistical package. Ease of use, power, and cost are some of the important considerations in the choice of computer software for data analysis.

8. Write the survey report

The analyzed data are interpreted and the results of this interpretative process are reported. The purpose of a survey report is to tell the readers the research problem, data collection methods used, findings, and conclusions. Like other research reports, the survey report should consist of an executive summary, introduction, description of the methods, results and discussion, and conclusions.

7 Basic Steps to Segmenting Audience

To create your audience segmentation, consult the seven basic steps below.

The following steps are recommended for developing an audience segmentation (Compass, n.d.):

1. Collect the information on the primary audiences from situation analysis and audience analysis.
2. Identify the audience characteristics to determine whether segmentation is necessary.
3. Decide what criteria to use to segment your audience by demographics, geography, behavioural, and psychographic.
4. Segment the audience to highlights potential audience segments.
5. Target the audience from many segments are identified.
6. Evaluate whether each segment meets the criteria for effective segmentation.
7. Develop comprehensive Audience Profiles and write the creative brief.