6 reasons over-segmentation is hurting your value proposition

You have a nice plaque on the wall showing your mission, vision and values. Do your employees think that’s what you really stand for?

You also have a nice list of value proposition points in your marketing department. But, is that what your customers really think of you? How do you know?

Where did those value proposition statements come from? Possibly from awesome customer research methods that actually deliver spurious results.

The most important thing you can optimize is your value proposition.

Your value proposition is not what you write in your marketing planning documents. Your real value proposition is what your customers perceive. It’s what the world actually thinks of you.

To add a wrinkle to this, each person is different. Yes, the snowflake analogy works here.

Each person looks at the world through different eyes. Your visitors have unique frames of reference that are colored by their perceptual filters. It’s as if they each wear different glasses that change what they’re looking at before it reaches them.

That’s true. Everyone is unique and perceives uniquely. That’s one of the reasons your small member qualitative research doesn’t apply to your overall market.

Many today are striving for a technological utopia where you can divine individuals’ uniquenesses, place each prospect into a personalized box and target him and her with self-actualizing, psychologically-triggered ultra-messages.

But, as much as technologist would have you believe that you can speak uniquely to each individual and magically hit their individual needs and wants, life ain’t like that. It’s not so simple, and there’s a better way.

The key is in finding relevant prospect groups. Your goal should be to find the largest possible relevant segments that can be aggregated. Yes, I said the “largest possible.” Gasp!

But, hang on for a moment, Chris. Don’t you buy into the drive to solo-segmentation?

In a word: “No.”

But, segmentation *is* important.

Segmentation is important for relevance. But too much segmentation is harmful to your results.

It’s just like carrots. You know they’re good for you, but too many could give you adverse side effects.

The most important thing you can optimize is your value proposition. And the drive to infinitesimal target segments hurts your value proposition discovery.

Customer segments allow you to group people with similar needs and information filters. As a marketer, you need to look for more commonalities among customer needs rather than just differences.

6 reasons you should create the largest possible target segments

1. Most importantly, it allows you to optimize. Testing and optimization requires traffic. Traffic gets much less useful when it’s split up into dozens or hundreds of tiny segments.
2. It reduces maintenance costs. Imagine you have a product or offer update and you need to change your landing pages to reflect that. Would you rather update and QA (you do a thorough QA process, right?) four pages, or four hundred?
3. Clarity trumps personalization. Clarity of your most important value proposition is more valuable than individually unique customization. You’ll make greater improvements with finding the right message for your product than individualizing your message.
4. Macro insights beat micro improvements. The faster you can find business-wide insights in messaging, design, layout, content, eyeflow, copywriting style, etc., the faster you can make improvements that generate huge revenue lift company-wide.
5. Small data lies. Too much customization is based on increasingly spurious data. You can’t really know anything about a person based on a handful of actions. Over-customizing messaging often increases Distraction and reduces Clarity. Mass personalization technology isn’t new. It’s just experiencing a revived sexiness online.
6. Over-personalization is creepy. Unless you’re targeting digital marketers like yourself, who are excited to see examples of personalization, your customers are creeped out by how much you know about them. Just ask the NSA how we feel about it.

Prior to founding WiderFunnel, I won awards for planning a complex, mass-personalization direct marketing campaign. And I can tell you that, as mind-bendingly complex and technically advanced as it was, the marketer got more benefit from testing the overarching messaging.

Yes, technology exists to target infinite segments. But, just as with any shiny, new marketing toy, the benefits must outweigh the costs.

Emphasize value proposition testing

Start by testing your value proposition to find out which points are most important to emphasize. Then, segment your messages with discipline, only creating new target segments that are proven to respond uniquely.