When you get customer segmentation right, you show leads content that gets them excited about buying from you.
What Is Customer Segmentation?
Customer segmentation is a marketing strategy that organizes buyers into groups. The groupings allow marketing teams to nurture leads with personalized content and convert them to customers.
For instance, types of customer segmentation in B2B marketing might include industry, business size and location, and technology stack.
Marketers then use this information to guide their lead nurturing campaigns and GTM strategies.
Something to think about: According to Folloze, 77% of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe personalized marketing experiences make for better customer relationships.
By segmenting your B2B customer lists, you can start building critical relationships with leads from the first contact.
What Are Key Segments in Marketing?
To build out customer segments, marketers use data based on multiple segment types. Because we’re focusing on B2B marketing, here are three key segments and how they fit with B2B customer segmentation.
1. Demographic and Firmographic Segmentation
B2B marketers lean more on firmographics than demographics. Demographics might focus on gender, income, and ethnicity (handy for building buyer personas).
However, for the B2B target customer segment, firmographics are a marketer’s go-to grouping. With the correct firmographic data, marketers can target campaigns based on industry, decision-maker roles, or revenue.
For example, a supply-chain management software brand might segment leads using firmographics to target CEOs and CFOs at food industry companies with 500+ employees.
2. Behavioral Segmentation
For behavioral segmentation, intent data plays a significant role in understanding lead behaviors.
Marketers might create a customer segment based on website activity, such as visits to a product page or watching customer success videos.
3. Geographic Segmentation
Geographic segmentation can help the marketing team target customers by location. This can be as narrow as city and zip code or as broad as a global region (e.g., Australasia or the European Union).
For example, if your go-to-market strategy focuses on the U. S. Pacific Northwest, geographic data will ensure you’re targeting leads in Oregon and Washington.
Why Is Customer Segmentation Analysis Important?
Segmentation analysis helps marketers determine segment quality. And that starts with clean data. To ensure segmentation success, your CRM requires quality data.
Imagine this: You build a product launch email campaign. You base your email list segmentation on contract manufacturing leads in your CRM.
Data analysis reveals gaps in contact information due to factors such as leadership changes and mergers and acquisitions.
With a data clean-up, personalized emails go to verified contacts, resulting in fewer bounces and (hopefully) a higher open rate.
How to Segment B2B Customers Based on Value
Sure, you want a pipeline of hot leads that sales will scramble over to close. However, the value a customer can bring to your business also matters.
Understanding your most valuable customers can minimize spending time and resources on leads whose budgets don’t fit your product’s price.
Existing Customer Segmentation
Which existing customers would you love to clone? The sophisticated buyers that use your product to its full potential and renew their subscription for several years at a time?
By segmenting existing customers based on the value they bring to your business — their customer lifetime value (CLV) — you can target future marketing efforts to keep them excited about your products or services.
This creates opportunities for upselling to them as you release new products.
Account-Based Marketing Segmentation
Speaking of customers who create the most value for your business, where are you segmenting your account-based marketing (ABM) data?
By nature, ABM focuses on personalization and building long-term relationships with customers — a good fit for B2B’s often complex buying cycles and multiple decision-makers.
Segmenting ABM data allows you to personalize your marketing efforts and possibly increase revenue potential.
For instance, grouping customers based on where they are in the buyer’s journey will ensure 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 over the customer’s lifetime with your brand.
Personalization Is at the Heart of Customer Segmentation
Knowing what your leads want to see next is essential for marketing success. Give them the ill-placed email or a miss-the-mark blog post, and your prospect might get the impression that you’re taking them on the wrong path.
More importantly, the non-segmented content could damage how the lead views your brand.
However, with streamed data fueling your marketing automation processes, leads will receive content that matches where they are in the buyer’s journey.
These personalized touchpoints will lay the foundation for building solid customer relationships you can then hand over to sales.