Do B2B companies need to invest in segmentation or should we save it for B2C?

Connecting on a deeper level leads to longer lasting relationships. That holds true with your audience as well, in other words – strategize to personalize.? The better personalized your content is, the higher chance it has at succeeding. We say “better” personalized, not just “more”, because segmentation is the key to better personalization.?

Why do so many B2B companies repeatedly make the same mistake and wrongly assume that segmenting contacts is for B2C alone??

Today, we debunk this assumption for good, and dive into the pool of opportunities proper segmentation brings B2B organizations.?

Here is a quick summary for busy readers:?

• B2B decision makers are regular people, so it makes sense to approach them like people, not like their job titles
• Back in 2015, 77% of ROI came from segmented campaigns. The role of personalization grew significantly since then, and so has the impact of segmentation
• Segmentation reflects on the user experience, lead generation, CAC, CLV, and even ROI?
• You should gather customer information (such as job title, company size, industry, etc.) to segment your contacts in niche groups based on their professional and personal challenges
• Marketing automation can take care of most segmentation-related B2B processes for you, but you need to be smart about it and set it up strategically?

Why you should always segment your contacts – even in B2B

My general stance on this one is simple: there are the same people representing B2B and B2C brands alike. People like you and I, who do the research and make decisions. And nowadays, people’s attention spans are at their lowest, barely reaching 8 seconds.?

That means two things.?

First, regardless of your industry and target audience, you need to make sure your message reaches the right person from the first try. Linda from the Performance team most definitely will not pass your message to Sales just because you kindly asked her in your cold outreach messaging. She will forget about it in an instant, as would a lot of people in her shoes, no matter how good your offer was. Or she’ll decide every other person in her organization also received the same message.?

Either way, if your communication doesn’t land precisely in the inbox it’s intended for, you can very well forget about it.?

Second, you need to get to the point as soon as possible. So, say Linda was the person you wanted to reach. Let her know what it is you need from her ASAP. Contemporary email culture isn’t merciful to long creative introductions and courteous signoffs. If we’re talking C-level, even a newsletter form won’t always work, as it expects the recipient to scroll to the part they’re most interested in and not everybody has time for that.?

Today, you need to know exactly what, how, when, and to whom you want to communicate before typing “Hello, {first.name}.” It really does come down to the all-time favorite topic, personalization, which is just as important in B2B as it is in B2C these days.

The many uses of B2B segmentation

Some would say that the example from above is explanation enough. But let’s talk specifics, just in case.?

Customer segmentation is a nifty trick that checks many boxes:

Cold outreach Lead nurturing Newsletters

Product offers Web content Paid ads

Testimonials Discounts Rewards

A perfect business would leverage segmentation for marketing, sales, customer experience, and everything in between. After all, it’s the best way to ensure your clients feel like they’re special while most of your processes run on automation – an undeniable luxury for competing industries!?

How B2B companies segment their contacts

An average ecommerce store would segment their customers based on various aspects, such as:?

Demographics: gender, age, household income, geographic area, education, family situation?

Psychographics: personality traits, interests, beliefs, values, lifestyle?

On-site behavior: time on page, links clicked, spending habits,?redirects and sources, product browsed, items added to cart?

While third-party cookies are still with us, lots of brands would also leverage data from third-party sources to personalize their offers and segment their customers even further. But, tracking cookies are a sinking ship, as you may know. So for the purposes of this article, let’s pretend that third-party tracking is no more.???

Where do we get the data?

The data sources for B2B segmentation are pretty similar to those for B2C companies. It’s the data itself that’s different.?

It’s fairly simple. Products and services offered for B2B are usually of higher investment, whether it’s an expensive single-time purchase or a commitment to a year-long subscription. WordStream puts it quite nicely with this graphic below:?

What’s more, in B2B you usually go after the decision makers who aren’t necessarily your end customers. Budgets are oftentimes in the hands of team leads and department heads, while it’s us specialists who use the service the most.?

Your inbound campaigns must be optimized for both parties’ interests, digital habits, and train of thought. And the data you gather needs to help you differentiate between all the different stakeholders from the start, so that you can tailor your communications for them later on.??

Let’s not forget about outbound campaigns, where sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are your best friends. Personal interests and on-site behavior become significantly less important here, and instead, we care about typical B2B metrics, like:

• Industry
• Company size
• Position at the company
• Social influence

But how can you be certain of what to look for?

Business personas create context

In our marketing podcast, we often circle back to the same conclusion: Always. Know. Your. Customer. Developing several precise business personas can help you with that.?

A single business rarely gets by on a single persona. Instead, we strongly encourage you to go into as much detail as possible. This way, you’ll be able to segment all your content and product offers accordingly, making sure that only the right stuff reaches the right people.?

And don’t just think in business categories! Sure, your persona may be an influential CTO from a worldwide enterprise. But they also have family, after-hours interests, and, well, lives. So tailor your communications in line with the social and cultural scenarios they are prone to respond to.

Don’t just talk about business challenges. Of course, the CEO wants to grow revenue, and CMO is after new qualified leads. But they also probably struggle with work-life balance, may be receiving too many irrelevant emails, and simply don’t have those 20 minutes for “a quick discovery call” you want to offer.?

Why not add another layer to your segmentation to reflect just that??

Segmentation → Personalization → Automation

Marketing automation may not save you all the troubles regarding effective contact segmentation and management, but it surely helps!?

Starting with minimal effort (like making sure you only send emails and notifications at a reasonable time by always using recipients’ time zones), you already get ahead of the people blindly mass-sending alerts.?

But there’s more.?

With marketing automation, you can also gather customer data and store it for future use. It’s less prominent in B2B organizations because less emphasis is put on users’ on-site behavior. Which is a big mistake.?

For example, you can study the types of content a user is most interested in on your site to tailor a unique selection of topics for them in your next newsletter. Okay, perhaps you wouldn’t do that for each and every contact in your database, but you can group them by topics of interest and personalize your communications that way.?

Or you could organize your notifications by job title to make sure that your contacts only get pinged regarding something crucial to their positions. If a CMO is most likely to be interested in the brand new client you’ve signed up (to compare if they could benefit from your services as well), a CTO is more likely to take an interest in your recent product update or the latest integration (to see if the technology meets their standards).?

Different marketing automation features come in handy here:

• Lead scoring and tagging would help you monitor these types of activities more efficiently (add score when a lead performs the desired action or assign them a tag when they interact with different elements of your website).
• Customized forms allow you to gather the information you need from the first touch-point – don’t just ask for the first name and email – shorter forms convert better, but they don’t give you enough to build relationships off. Ask for job title and industry or other crucial metrics from the start.?
• Segment based on your subscribers’ consent – it’s easy to get lost in different legal forms and clauses, especially when it comes to marketing vs. commercial communications, automation will keep track of that for you.

You absolutely need segmentation

For B2B organizations, 57% of the purchase process is complete before the business contacts a company they plan to buy from. That means, more than half of all the decision-making takes place on marketing and customer experience grounds. It’s the experience the business has with the brand that eventually persuades them to partner up with you.?

That’s done through outstanding customer support, helpful content, and, well, segmentation.

In fact, if done right, segmentation can be responsible for a whole lot, such as:?

• Increasing your Returns on Sales
• Reducing your CAC?
• Improving your content marketing
• Supporting lead generating and nurturing
• Increasing your CLV??

It’s time to stop the B2C/B2B marketing divide and bring people the personalization they deserve through advanced contact segmentation.??

Anna Kvasnevska,

Senior Content Marketing Specialist