Audience Segmentation Helps Expand Customer Base

LAS VEGAS - At a Nov. 3 PestWorld 2021 educational session, John Lonsbury shared his secret to reeling in more customers: knowing the right customers to target and knowing where they are located.

In his presentation “Two Amazingly Effective Strategies to Instantly Improve Your Marketing Results,” Lonsbury, sales and marketing manager at Adam’s Pest Control, Medina, Minn., explained how pest control companies can use audience segmentation analysis — grouping customers into segments to predict their behavior — and location marketing to expand their customer base.

By analyzing data such as the age, gender, income, ethnicity, residence, interests, values and spending habits of customers, businesses can pinpoint their key customer base and market to that specific group, Lonsbury explained. This is the basis of audience segmentation.

So how does a company track down such specific customer data? Lonsbury advised hiring a vendor who specializes in interpreting this type of information to help with the audience segmentation process. Adam’s Pest Control uses Claritas Prizm Premier. 

Claritas analyzed the current Adam’s customer base and organized these customers into different audience segments based on their demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral data. For example, a customer may be grouped in Claritas’ “Multi-Culti Mosaic” segment. This set of customers tends to live in more urban areas, and many are first-generation Americans striving to improve their economic status. 

Claritas predicts where this group of people might shop, their education level, their interests, their age group and more. This data allows companies to better define their customer base to better know how to market to them.

“Your [customer] prospects could vary widely,” said Lonsbury. “You want to be able to take them and put them into these different segmentations.”

Adam’s then works with Claritas and its segmentation data to find lookalike audiences with similar attributes “who may not be your audience now, but have the propensity to purchase pest control,” said Lonsbury.

The Adam’s marketing team creates a map of lookalike audiences by zip code, pinpointing specific locations where their ideal customer base lives. By analyzing segmentation profiles, Adam’s is able to develop meaningful marketing content directed specifically to that audience segment based on their interests, life stages and other characteristics, Lonsbury said.

The Adam’s Pest Control pay-per-click rate is three times the national rate because of this marketing strategy, he said.

“It’s because we know who our customers are and our prospects are, and we know where they are,” said Lonsbury.