In the world of consumer marketing, segmentation is complex. There’s loads of resource deployed to understanding consumer types and behaviour. Searching for a single customer view with demographics, financials, product history and behaviour – enabling an end goal of insight, predicting and personalising.
But when it comes to B2B, segmentation is a poor cousin. There’s nowhere near the levels of sophistication needed, but there’s inconsistency and gaps. Consider the sale value and complexity of the B2B sales process, and it becomes clear that there’s some compelling reasons to segment your B2B database.
At GTMHive, we thought we’d shine the spotlight on B2B segmentation - and explore the 'Why' and 'How' you can improve performance through segmentation.
Start with why?
With a data and insight driven understanding of your customers and prospects, you can tailor messages and personalise marketing campaigns to meet their needs. You’re speaking with them about things that are relevant to them (and not your push/sell agenda). That means, better results, less waste and higher quality pipeline for both Acquisition and Account Based Marketing activity. Segmentation lets you hit the accelerator pedal. There’s also the softer, but important, brand benefit - after all, you don’t want your prospects and customers to associate your brand with words like pestering, bombarding or irritating!
Prospects - Profiling Best Customer Types
B2B customer segmentation helps you to figure out who your best customers are across a range of data points. The information can then be replicated to improve prospect activity either through personas or ICPs.
Build a picture of their unique challenges and needs, and
Create more personalised experiences that demonstrate you understand their pain points and opportunities
When you successfully zoom into specific customer groups with targeted messaging that resonates with them, performance goes up so does respect. When you speak the same language, you shorten the sales cycle.
Account Based Marketing
Keeping contacts in existing client firms informed is important. It’s known to improve reputational standing and CSat scores. Personalising contact from Account Directors helps improve their profile. In client organisations, direct contact is often quite narrow, so ABM helps keep contacts on the periphery informed and engaged – offering up opportunities for follow up conversations.
How to apply B2B customer segmentation
B2B customer segmentation strategy is normally in 2 parts
First, creating the segments and data points, and second, using them
Creating
Figure out what your client segments are (Starter for 10 below). Talk to people in the sales and product functions, analyse existing customer and prospect data - or if you have a blank sheet, come up with a hypothesis to inform a discussion.
Find out who your highest performing clients are – by volume, margin, sector or other data points. This can help you build up ideal customer profiles or personas to help target and tailor to your core market and any adjacencies you want to test.
Using
Speak to front line sales people about what they are hearing - you can then start to build up narrative frameworks with key messages. Tailored to decision maker and influencer role types.
Plugging in CRM is crucial here – it will pull through lots of information from different sources of sales and marketing activity.
You should also include quarantines so you don't overload clients - especially useful if you send both marketing and operational communications, or have multiple product activity.
Lead scoring can be switched on for both prospects and clients. In it's simplest form, allocate a score against individual activity such as email opens, link clicks, social engagement, webinar attendance and so on. You can then track database growth and warmth as a pre-cursor to pipeline quality in your dashboard. Include threshold triggers – for example an informed outbound courtesy call for a prospect or client reaching a set score.
B2B marketing database segments – a starter for 10
Here are some categories to consider, once you get started you’ll quickly see how easy it is to expand:
1. Organisation: Capture a range of characteristics such as industry/sector, size (could be multiple data points - employee count, revenue, profit), locations, parent.
2. Contact Decision-maker type: Segmenting based on job titles or roles within the organisation. Include influencers like management consultancy firms
3. Potential: Identifying sweet spots – ICP or persona that links to your strategy.
4. Psychographic: Identified needs, attitudes, and pain points of different groups.
5. Behavioural: Purchase history and timeline, Engagement – content topics, channel usage (email, webinars, events, social), and content consumption.
6. Solution: Focusing on the specific tasks or problems your product or service will help to solve, or the opportunities it will help to unlock.
Next Steps
If you need help with Marketing strategy, segmentation or communication approach - or would like a consultation or audit on your marketing effort, our GTM Marketing experts can help – check out our rates now.
You can also read the blogs and use our free templates for a range of Marketing topics, including Modern Marketing Structures, Marketing Strategy and Planning, Value Propositions, Agency selection/briefing and much more. They're all in the Hive Knowledge Hub.
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