Are you a B2B marketer who loves data? Do you have a passion for generating and qualifying
leads that result in more conversions for your company? Have you invested in technologies like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) to facilitate those processes?
If so, it sounds like you’re doing everything right—that is, as long as you’re practicing segmentation.
Having a well-segmented lead database is critical for several reasons. This strategy allows you to use profiling of both current customers and prospects to build target account lists, ensuring your messaging is falling on receptive ears. Segmenting can help you learn your best point-of-entry into those target accounts, saving time and resources. On the other hand, segmented lead lists tell you whom not to target, preventing your engagement rate from potentially plummeting because of an audience misfire.
While MAPs are built to create targeted campaigns and personalized engagements—which they do—they are also often designed to market to individual leads rather than entire accounts. In the account-centric B2B space, this is a problem. The answer? You guessed it: Segmentation. Done well, segmentation can fill in those gaps, supplementing the metrics that allow for the kind of big-picture analyses required to assess the success of account-level initiatives.
That’s why segmentation works, but how do you do it, exactly? The four most popular segmentation dimensions are as follows: Job level, job function, company size, and industry. Seems simple enough, right? Actually, there are variables to account for and language intricacies that you need to know to excel. Do you know how to approach the nuances in job titles when creating your segmentation scheme? How about how to create a rules engine that puts raw data into perspective? Ever worked on custom industry mapping using reference data?
Here’s the point: Segmentation doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process, and a varied one at that—there’s no such thing as standard segmentation. What you will undoubtedly need is enriched data, a plan to remap that enriched data into segments, and a technology solution that facilitates the process.
Over at The Marketing Scope, we’ve presented a guide from OpenPrise to give you insight into tactics, challenges, and best practices that will help you leverage the power of a well-segmented lead database. You’re a marketer in a world of data, after all—you might as well use it to sell more. This guide can tell you how.
Download the FREE guide here: The Practical Guide to B2B Segmentation.
Photo Credit: ebizworldwide Flickr via Compfight cc
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