The world can be a chaotic place. We are constantly exposed to vast amounts of stimuli, information, events, and people, all of which we must interact with and respond to. Our minds have to make snap decisions and recall important information at a moment’s notice. Considering how much we process every day, it’s remarkable that we can remember anything at all, or make decisions without writing pros-and-cons lists.
Clustering is one of the reasons we can make quick decisions and recall valuable information in the right context. Our mind organizes information into groups to help us generate quick mental reflexes. If we didn’t cluster information, it would take us too long to remember anything or come to any conclusions. It’s a valuable piece of our mind’s cognition process.
Usually clustering is subconscious, but using this tactic can help you improve your audience’s experience, your search engine optimization, and the way in which you analyze data.
Clustering for audience
Understanding how the mind processes information can give you the upper hand when deciding how to convey information to your audience.
For example, clustering information rapidly improves memory. This is why teachers often use acronyms and grouping methods to help their students memorize information for their next exam. From a marketing standpoint, logically grouping what is most important can increase your chances that your audience will remember the information you’re trying to convey.
This method can be used for content and titles (for example, our webinar on marketing during an economic downturn focused on three steps: Pause, Pivot, Proceed that are easy to remember) and how you organize your social media profiles (we arrange our Instagram story highlights into Good, Team, Fun, Client Love, and Marketing).
Websites often use clustering to help their audience navigate as well. Take OutmarkⓇ for example. Our website header is formatted into different categories — Work, About, Case Studies, Blog, and Get Started. Because our brains categorize information, navigating a website with clear topic headers that can be broken down makes your website more user friendly.
Clicking on Outmark’s About topic leads the user to a page explaining what we do. The way we’ve categorized this page helps the user process information by breaking it down again into three simple but memorable categories: Plan, Do, and Review.
Clustering like this improves your audience’s memory as they navigate your website, remembering better what you have to offer and why they should choose you.
Clustering for SEO
Clustering is also helpful for search engine optimization. Search engines have evolved their algorithms to focus on “topic based content.”
This method includes a set of “topic clusters,” which are content pieces on your website that link to a broader subject — the pillar content. Each of your content pieces expands upon this pillar content.
The benefits of formatting your website into a cluster setup include:
- Signaling to search engines that your content has depth, which will give the pillar page more authority
- Orderly linking is rewarded with higher search placement
- Highly focused keywords and phrases will gain more search traffic
- As clusters are ranked higher, your pillar content will have more credibility on Google and other search engines
Clustering for marketing analysis
Clustering can also be helpful for internal analysis processes. Cluster analysis is a mathematical model used to find groups of customers that are similar to each other. These groups can be called “customer archetypes” or “personas.” You can learn more about the exact process for cluster analysis here.
This kind of cluster analysis is highly beneficial for marketers for categorizing an audience into groups in order to better understand how to target each of them. It makes that decision making process faster and easier.
One way to use this data is through market segmentation, which means that customers can be clustered into different groups according to their needs, and how they will benefit from what your company has to offer. Because each group is divided and grouped according to their benefits, it helps you to internally develop a plan on how to target these unique needs specifically. This data can also better pinpoint your customers’ buyer behaviors.
Clustering helps your marketing team organize data into something easily digestible — making it more actionable for your team!
Utilizing the brain’s natural way of clustering information can improve your audience’s experience, search engine optimization, and the way in which you organize internal data, thus improving your overall marketing strategy.
