5 Steps to Segment Clients of Security Companies | The Virtual Matrix

Have you ever received a marketing message for a product you have already purchased from a company? Isn’t it annoying? Does it feel like the company doesn’t care enough to know you already have the product or service? 

Security Companies often use a “shotgun” approach or undifferentiated marketing when sending out marketing messages hoping something will eventually stick! Unfortunately, this generic approach has the potential to turn loyal customers off. 

One of the many market segmentation advantages when segmenting your current and potential customers properly and then tailoring messages accordingly is improved customer engagement. It allows you to send personalized emails to the right audience and to find out more about your target niche.

In this article, we look at the different ways you can segment your audience and the benefits this brings to your security company.

Let’s dive straight in! 

1. Understand Your Audience

Most security companies offer more than one product or service. Each product or service you offer appeals to a different target audience. For example, it is highly unlikely a customer who is interested in fire alarm monitoring for his restaurant would be interested in armed security services. At its core, market segmentation is the marketing strategy of dividing your target market into approachable groups. You cannot succeed in the market segmentation process without defining your target audience first. By understanding who they are and where they are (target market demographics), you can apply the basic principles of target market segmentation. Then you can create personalized messages that resonate with your that audience.

Research data should drive your marketing strategy and enable you to better understand your target audience by creating buyer personas. These are representations of your customers that help you place yourself in their shoes and find out what they are searching for.

As a result, you can create marketing campaigns that best appeal to your audience. Let’s consider the restaurant owner who has fire alarm monitoring services mentioned earlier. He is much more likely to be interested in fire alarm test and inspection services or learning about the latest fire alarm equipment and trends than he would be in armed security services.

2. Use The Native Social Media Targeting Tools

You might think that you will have to pay for customer segmentation tools. However, there are free target market analysis tools for selecting target markets on various social media platforms. Take Facebook for example. The allow for geographic segmentation, demographic segmentation, and even consumer psychographics.

And if you are on LinkedIn, you can create your digital marketing strategy around business positioning such as industry and even company size, all for free.

3. Choose The Best Time To Communicate

Timing is among the most important factors to consider when marketing to your audience. This is especially valid when using email and social media.

After evaluating your target niche and creating your marketing strategy template, you will likely discover that similar profiles operate homogeneously. For example, if your target customer is a restaurant owner, it is probably not going to be effective to email or post on social media at 7am and expect they will be online or reading their email. Restaurants usually open later and operate later (unless they serve breakfast of course!).

If you provide Executive Protection services, geographic segmentation could be relevant because your customers could also be in different geographical locations either locally or around the world. When your audience in the US is just waking up, those in Europe are likely going to bed.

By scheduling your marketing campaign to send at times that are appropriate to your audience, you can improve the chances that your audience receives the message resulting in a much greater engagement and a more effective marketing strategy.

4. Streamline The Process

You can streamline your marketing by using various available email and social media tools. These allow you to create marketing campaigns that are specific to your target audience.

Some tools will help you create your advertisements while also managing all sections of your ads and campaigns from a centralized location.

Using marketing tools effectively, will provide you the opportunity to create a different workflow based on everyone’s engagement. For example, assume you sent a message to our restaurant owner introducing the following 3 products or services:

·    Annual fire test and inspection service contracts

·    New equipment

·    Burglar alarm monitoring

Let’s say he clicks on more information regarding burglar alarm monitoring, you can now add him to your burglar alarm monitoring segment – or even have a salesperson reach out to him directly with a tailored offer.

5. Test and Evaluate Your Strategies

When it comes to targeting in marketing, less is more. If you bombard customers with too many messages, they're going to tune out. Try to streamline all your marketing efforts and make them cohesive. This will help customers feel like you care about them and their experience with your company.

Lead generation and market segmentation are two important aspects of any successful digital marketing campaign. Test different targeted marketing campaigns and strategies and see what works best for your security company. Not everything will work for everyone, so it's important to find what resonates with your existing and potential customers. Having segmented your audience and sent your targeted marketing campaigns, you also need to evaluate their performance. For example, evaluate open rates by testing different subject lines. 

Ongoing objective evaluation is an important part of the process. 

Conclusion

The more time you spend understanding your audience and how they think, the better chance you have of getting them to buy. Remember that social media platforms are not just places for posting content; they’re also powerful lead generation and target marketing tools when used properly. 

Take advantage of their native targeting features where possible. Find out what times work best for communicating with your customers to avoid overwhelming their inboxes or missing an opportunity because it passed by too quickly. Streamline this process as much as possible so that everything is organized in one place and easy to refer to later on if needed. 

If this all seems like Greek to you, why not partner with us and let us help you figure out which strategies will work for your security company and customer base.  Book a free, no obligation, no pressure chat today!