Storytelling & a strong brand

When most people think about activation, they still picture infographics and tables. Today’s activation is all about creating captivating stories in a variety of mediums that capture people’s attention. Your materials need to be treated with the same love, care and attention as a full marketing campaign. You need to create a striking visual identify across all of your different materials. Bring your segments to life through stunning visuals, storytelling techniques, and interactivity.

Get specific where possible

Throughout your segmentation programme you may have captured all manner of data. Wherever possible you need to match the right data to the right people. As an example, you may have data that a segment X read a certain newspaper. This information may not be of use to most of your organisation but would be useful to someone in advertising. Squeeze your data you have, or make that data accessible so that people can drill down and find nuggets of information for themselves.

Cross-pollination tools

Marry together your business needs with segmentation data. Use workshop and co-creation tools to build on your initial data and then think about ways you can use collaborative spaces so data can be annotated and discussed. In order to have the most impact, it’s key that different departments are actively engaged and working alongside relevant insight.

Leverage different voices

It’s important to continually feedback the impact of your segmentation programme. The outcomes of a programme may be far removed from its launch. It might be 18 months later when you launch that new product line, but still its key to remind people that this all started with the segmentation. Ask other people to create short testimonials on how they have used the segments or how it might have influenced their work. Bring together customer success stories as well as wins throughout the business to reinforce the value and gains that can be had by tailoring your approach to specific segments.

Go back to your segmentation data

Segmentation studies typically involve large samples, and quite long surveys. This means they create an extremely rich data set that can be mined independently to the segmentation process itself. These simpler category-level insights are sometimes neglected or forgotten about amongst the excitement of new segments to play with. If there isn’t a clear linkage between the data collected and internal needs, or resource in place to run and interpret this detailed analysis, then you’ll be neglecting a huge source of competitive advantage.

We would encourage this dataset to be added into any existing data lakes (a repository of data stored in its natural/raw form) and in particular usage and attitude data should be brought out and made accessible to wider team members, through online dashboards, cross-tabbing tools, or via support contracts.