7 Ways to Use Segmentation to Improve B2B Campaign Success

Satisfying people’s needs with the right marketing strategies to boost sales and expand your brand’s reach is the purpose of marketing. Identifying customers’ needs and recognizing differences between groups of customers can feel like a daunting task and there’s no single process or strategy that provides perfect results for every business. However, using segmentation allows you to find the right strategy and message for your audience. It matches customers’ needs with suppliers’ needs making the customer comfortable with their decisions.

Table of Contents
7 Ways to Use Segmentation to Improve B2B Campaign Success
  1. #1 Segment Key Accounts
  2. #2 Segmentation Analysis for Smaller Accounts
  3. #3 Consider a Firmographic Segmentation
  4. #4 Use Your CRM and Automation Tools
  5. #5 Design Creative Content and Do a Test Run to Track Results
  6. #6 Repeat the Process
  7. #7 Develop Personas
Benefits of using segmentation to improve B2B campaigns
  1. Enhances relevance
  2. Improved personalization
  3. Customer satisfaction
  4. Reduces time, cost, and efforts
  5. Better lead nurturing
Conclusion

Market segmentation allows you to personalize marketing campaigns to acquire new customers and also retain old ones. Targeted ad campaigns increase click rates and conversions and personalization impacts the purchase decisions of consumers. So, create effective campaigns that are appropriate to your customers.

7 Ways to Use Segmentation to Improve B2B Campaign Success

#1 Segment Key Accounts

To improve B2B campaign success every company needs to segment its customers. Customers aren’t all the same and every B2B company has key accounts that are recognized as different and given special treatment. These key accounts amount to just a couple of handful of customers with a huge turnover.  Therefore, such customers should be treated as individuals, and provide products and services to exactly meet their needs.

#2 Segmentation Analysis for Smaller Accounts

In B2B companies small accounts dominate the customer population and should not be treated in the same way as the key accounts as they can run in too many hundreds of accounts. Therefore, segmentation allows you to group together customers with similar needs so that you can customize their requirements to serve them better yielding high profits.

#3 Consider A Firmographic Segmentation

One of the simplest ways is to develop your segment hypothesis, identify variables, and validate them with thorough research. You can group together companies with a common attribute such as region, industry, etc. as these classifications are important to understand their needs. Demographics in B2C markets and firmographics in B2B markets is an important driver of its needs.  You can use your hypothesis as the basis for your segmentation. Therefore, segmentation is one of the most obvious and often most useful we can employ in B2B markets.

#4 Use Your CRM and Automation Tools

Installing CRM, you will have access to complete information on demographics and customer history which can be used to create a comprehensive list of your customers. It will determine who should be part of the analysis so that you can segment existing records by age, location, recent purchases, estimated customer lifetime value, etc.

Automation tools can be used for analytics and marketing automation to help gain more demographic and behavioral information about your prospect. It will help structure your campaigns, content management, tracking and reporting, budget allocation, and much more. By using the right tools, you can understand your customers’ online activity with your brand. You can use this to your advantage and then make adjustments to your marketing strategies, which may include personalized messaging, special offers, etc.

#5 Design Creative Content and Do a Test Run to Track Results

Once customer segmentation is done design compelling content that will appeal to each group. Try to understand their requirements so that you can design eye-catching visuals to grab their attention. You can also include offers, promotions, and discounts to target their preferences and reflect their buying behaviors.

Test run on the potentially lucrative segments you’ve identified who form a major chunk of your customer base? Roll out the content to your targeted segments, and wait for the campaign period to end to analyze the results. Now you can track your customers’ behavior to check which content was read the most, which customers opened particular emails that led to purchases, etc. during the test run. This analysis offers valuable insights to improve your market segmentation plan and sales funnel.

#6 Repeat the Process

Apply your test run insights for your next B2B campaigns. If you received a successful campaign response you can apply the same variables to a different segment of customers. You can also identify the campaign’s weak spots if any and redesign those elements. Then, test the results of your campaigns after the changes. You can repeat this at regular intervals, and moreover, regularly segmenting and testing will help you roll out the right marketing campaigns for your brand and audience. Therefore, you can adapt to changing consumer behavior to grow your business.

#7 Develop Personas  

Analyze the buying behaviors of your consumers and segregate them based on the parameters such as age, gender, income, occupation, etc. You can consider each group’s buying behavior that will help create targeted messaging. Moreover, you can modify your products and services based on your customers’ requirements. By understanding customer behaviors, you will be able to personalize more easily and offer products and services that will surely attract your customers.

Benefits of using segmentation to improve B2B campaigns

1. Enhances relevance

Segmentation helps businesses tailor their content and messaging to specific segments and effectively engages niche audiences by providing relevant information. Hence segmentation is the most efficient way to reach different target audience groups and address their particular challenges. This encourages the target audience to engage with the brand and are more likely to convert.

2. Improved personalization

Target audiences do not consume generic content when they already know what they want specifically. Every target audience is different and has different requirements. Segmentation helps to understand each customer deeply and empowers businesses with improved opportunities for personalization.

3. Customer satisfaction

Target audience know their preferences and interests and look for the products/services that align with their expectations. Segmentation helps brands to analyze their customers deeply and encourages the personalization of marketing campaigns.

When the target audience receives information that aligns with their expectations, it automatically increases customer satisfaction, increases engagement, and conversions.

4. Reduces time, cost, and efforts

Channeling all marketing efforts towards a generic audience is directionless. It takes a huge amount of effort, time, and cost to send the same message to every audience without knowing what they want and expect from a brand.

All the marketing efforts will reach to broader audience and irrelevant prospects which is a waste of effort. Instead, using segmentation helps businesses deliver personalized campaigns to each of the target audience segments and channel their efforts to those customers who are more likely to become customers.

5. Better lead nurturing

Segmentation allows businesses to tailor lead nurturing campaigns that focus on specific customer journeys and needs of each segment. Segmentation guides the potential customers through the sales funnel and delivers personalized content and communications to leads at different stages of their buying journey.

By leveraging segmentation in campaigns, businesses can simplify the sales cycle and engage the target audience effectively.

Conclusion

Efficient segmentation can transform your B2B campaign into a sure success by making it more relevant and appealing to your customers. When executed well, it will increase revenue and keep your company ahead of the competition. With segmentation, you can deliver the right message to the right consumer and learn your audiences’ preferences. Segmentation enables you to build better relationships with your customers, help your business save money on marketing costs, and significantly boost revenue.

b2b marketing success

Amy John is a marketing executive with over 12 years of experience in the execution of marketing and lead generation strategies.