Gap #1 – Part 1: Segmentation

Between product marketing and content marketing lies the questions – Who do we target, and how will we segment the market to target them??

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While B2B marketers might consider this question to be relevant only to product marketing planning or as part of campaign planning, it causes many marketing teams to put the proverbial content marketing “cart before the horse” – building out campaign frameworks to target accounts without building out meaningful thought leadership content that matches their go to market motions in advance.? This makes it almost impossible to bring campaigns to market efficiently or effectively, leading to delays.

So, how do you address this gap early and guide the content production process to align with the future needs of the marketing function?

Know what has worked before…

Success breeds success – so start with where you’ve been successful before.? Download a list of top deals from your CRM system from the past 1-2 years and look for commonalities.? Are there specific verticals/industries that keep popping up?? ??Do you have more success selling to specific segments?? Are some geographies more successful than others?? Are you more successful selling direct or through partners?

Keep an eye out for salespeople who keep showing up on top deals – it’s not uncommon to find a core team showing up repeatedly – and they are often your best source of information on why customers are buying and which customers to focus on for best results.? Customer success and support teams are also a wealth of knowledge on what deals fit the organization best.? Often, the deals that are easiest to implement are the use cases that are best aligned with the capabilities of your product – and are often the ones where the customer is experiencing the strongest ROI.? These deals will likely be the easiest to replicate in terms of sales and implementation success.

And what hasn’t…

Sometimes, you want to know who NOT to target, and win / loss programs are vital to helping you curate this information.?

Your CRM and marketing automation offer another great view of who NOT to target.? Look at your lead scoring model to see who tends to get disqualified early – and your CRM to understand which deals get stuck in the funnel and don’t progress.? Is there commonality on vertical, geography, segmentation or other firmographic factors that you can use to inform your targeting better upstream?

Which customers got down the funnel but chose not to purchase, and why did they choose not to? Look for disconnects between your stated capabilities and their needs.? There will always be customer groups that are not a particularly good fit for your solution compared to a niche market offering.? That’s OK – we can’t be all things to all people – and it will benefit your marketing and provide better marketing return on investment by knowing who NOT to target with our content and campaigns.

Don’t fall into the TAM trap

Who hasn’t fallen into the “Total Addressable Market” trap?? It is easy to think we will capture a small percentage of a large market without paying proper attention to how the needs of that market may or may not be aligned with the key strengths and competitive differentiators of our product.? Before starting to write content, consider what makes you unique in the eyes of a prospect and align that to applicable verticals, geographies, or company sizes.

Yes, TAM can be an essential indicator of the size of the market that you can address within a specific geography – but ensuring that your product is ready to compete within the geography – including features, usability, and pricing is critical for ensuring that you are focusing on the right customers when building out your messaging.

Also, remember that only a tiny portion of your TAM is in the market for a solution anytime.? Typically, only 5% of your total addressable market wants to purchase a new solution anytime.? So don’t forget to split your efforts into demand creation – focused on the 95% of customers who will one day be considering your solutions, and demand generation for the 5% actively seeking a new solution.

Ensure content production is aligned with sales

For your marketing to be successful, you also need to consider whether it is aligned with how your sales team is structured.? What are the key and named accounts that you have salespeople assigned to?? Are you planning to build out content addressing the audiences' needs in those accounts?

How is your sales team segmented to serve the market?? Are they mainly targeting enterprise accounts?? Are they assigned to help sell through channel partners?? Or are they focused on accounts within specific regions?

Working together with the product marketing teams to understand how your sales team is set up to approach the market is a crucial element to consider when planning out your marketing strategy – and ensuring that you are building the materials to support the sales motions that will be put into place to address to the key personas sprinkled across those accounts.

Don’t miss the key outliers

Analyzing markets in aggregate often leads to missing out on key outliers – who can often be your most avid advocates and profitable accounts.? Do small business customers buy large volumes of your solution in the same way an enterprise company might do?? At Dell – doing this analysis, we stumbled across this exact situation.? We found a set of customers who offered visual effects editing. ?To meet the demands of the movie studios, they had high computational needs and were required to constantly upgrade to the latest server and storage technology to run their business.

These outlier-type accounts – while small in number – were critical customers.? (We even partnered with them to have them test and benchmark new products before they came to market, and their movies became key customer events that our small business customers looked forward to every year).?You should also look for the outlier accounts that are taking your solution into new markets and use cases that you might not have considered before.? They may help you identify key areas where you can target new.

I hope this helps you think through the segmentation exercise – to ensure that your content strategy addresses your key go-to-market motions early in the planning process. ?In the future, I imagine we'll have in-house large language AI models that can help us to parse this data quickly - but today, we still have a lot of Excel work and thinking to do.

If you have other tips that have worked for you, I’d love to hear about them – so please comment below!