When you get your customer segmentation right, you’ll not only display lead content that makes sense to them, but you’ll also get your audience excited about buying from you.
What is customer segmentation?
Customer segmentation is a marketing strategy that organizes buyers into groups. With the help of the groupings, marketing teams can nurture leads with personalized content and convert them into customers.
The types of customer segmentation in B2B marketing include, for example, industry, company size and location, and technology stack.
Marketers then use this information to drive their lead nurturing campaigns and GTM strategies.
Think about it: According to Folloze, 77% of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe that personalized marketing experiences lead to better customer relationships.
By segmenting your B2B customer lists, you can build critical relationships with leads from the first contact.
What are key segments in marketing?
To build customer segments, marketers use data based on multiple segment types. Since we are focused on B2B marketing, here are three key segments and how they fit in with B2B customer segmentation.
1. Demographic and firmographic segmentation
B2B marketers rely more on firmographics than demographics. Demographics can focus on gender, income, and ethnicity (handy for building buyer personalities).
For the B2B target customer segment, company graphics are the point of contact for marketers. With the right firmography data, marketers can target campaigns according to industry, decision-makers or sales.
For example, a supply chain management software brand can use firmographs to segment leads to target CEOs and CFOs of food companies with more than 500 employees.
2. Behavioral segmentation
In behavioral segmentation, intent data plays an important role in understanding leadership behavior.
Marketers can create a customer segment based on website activity, such as: B. Visiting a product page or watching customer success videos.
3. Geographic segmentation
The geographic segmentation allows the marketing team to target customers by location. This can be as narrow as a city and zip code, or as wide as a global region (e.g. Australasia or the European Union).
For example, if your go-to-market strategy is focused on the northwestern US Pacific, geographic data will ensure that you are targeting leads in Oregon and Washington.
Why is customer segmentation analysis important?
With the help of segmentation analysis, marketers can determine the segment quality. And that starts with clean data. To ensure the success of segmentation, your CRM needs quality data.
Imagine this: You are creating a product launch email campaign. You base your email list segmentation on make-to-order leads in your CRM.
Data analysis reveals gaps in contact information due to factors such as leadership changes and mergers and acquisitions.
A data cleansing process sends personalized emails to verified contacts, resulting in fewer bounces and (hopefully) a higher open rate.
How to segment B2B customers by value
Sure, you want a pipeline of hot leads to close the sale. However, the value a customer can bring to your business is also important.
Understanding your most valuable customers can minimize the time and resources spent on leads whose budget does not match the price of your product.
Existing customer segmentation
Which existing customers would you like to clone? The discerning buyers who get the most out of your product and extend their subscription for several years?
By segmenting existing customers based on the value they bring to your company – their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – you can target future marketing efforts to get them excited about your products or services.
This creates opportunities for upselling to them when you release new products.
Account-based marketing segmentation
When you talk about customers who create the most value for your business, where do you segment your account-based marketing (ABM) data?
By nature, ABM is focused on personalizing and building long-term customer relationships – a great addition to the often complex buying cycles of B2B and multiple decision makers.
By segmenting ABM data, you can personalize your marketing efforts and potentially increase sales potential.
For example, when you group customers based on where they are on the buyer’s journey, make sure you curate the most valuable content for them.
Whether you’re targeting existing customers for an upsell or choosing your most profitable products to promote, segmenting your customer data will keep your marketing efforts focused and personalized for the life of the customer with your brand.
Personalization is at the heart of customer segmentation
Knowing what your leads want to see next is critical to marketing success. Give them the poorly-placed email or blog post that is missing the mark and your prospect may feel like you are leading them the wrong way.
More importantly, the unsegmented content can affect the lead’s view of your brand.
However, with streamed data fueling your marketing automation processes, leads get content that is appropriate to where they are on the buyer’s journey.
These personalized contact points form the basis for building solid customer relationships, which you can then hand over to sales.
Disclaimer of liability
ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. posted this content on March 06, 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by the public, unedited and unchanged, on March 06, 2021 13:18:06 UTC.