9 Big Benefits You Should Be Reaping From Your Marketing Segments — Part Two

In Part One of our blog: 9 Big Benefits You Should Be Reaping From Your Marketing Segments, we covered five major competitive advantages that your marketing segments can provide for you — beyond setting you up for ABM success. In Part Two, we conclude our journey with the final four benefits a smart B2B segmentation strategy offers.

Big Benefit #6:  Optimize Offerings

Today’s customers have an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to the offers they are receiving; however, you can make yours stand out from the crowd with a highly personalized approach. For example, if you have a small segment of customers who tend to purchase your products/services in response to seasonal ebbs and flows, you can cater to their needs by tailoring your offer according to their buying patterns, preferred channels, etc. Offers that are optimized according to a customer’s habits have a variety of proven advantages. They help reduce churn and promote greater brand loyalty by making the customer feel seen, heard and understood. In addition to demonstrating that your company is paying attention and truly cares, this approach also enables you to set (and get) higher prices for your offerings. Customers find great value in doing business with a company that anticipates their desires and is proactive in meeting them.

Big Benefit #7:  Enhance Content Strategy

According to research, the average marketer creates content for multiple audience segments. The same research also found that “72 percent of marketers report that having a good content strategy is a major key to their success.” Still another study found that 61 percent of customers are influenced by custom content.  Targeting content according to segment preferences is always a smart marketing move, but it can become tough to scale and rather expensive —unless your stack has a content personalization tool. A good personalization tool will allow you to save money on content by repackaging and repurposing content throughout your enterprise. Moreover, when you integrate a content personalization tool with your marketing automation platform (MAP) or customer relationship management system (CRM), you can automate the entire process.

Of course, it’s still a good idea to do a little due diligence from time to time by asking customers for direct feedback. For example, if your CDP shows that a certain segment is not responding to certain types of content the way they have in the past, don’t hesitate to contact a couple of customers in that segment and ask them questions like:

• What kind of information would you like to see?
• What are your favorite subscriptions and what do you like about them, i.e. (length, style, format, types of information provided, etc.)?
• What would make our blogs, feeds, web content, etc. more helpful for your business?

Big Benefit #8:  Prioritize Campaign Budgets

Of all the benefits your marketing segments offer, this one is by far the easiest to take advantage of. As you use your MAP and customer data platform CDP to track each of your individual segments over the course of a campaign, you’ll inevitably see that certain emails, SMS messages, direct mails and feeds are generating more clicks and activities than others. Armed with this information, you can respond quickly by spending more of your campaign budget on the marketing efforts that are producing the biggest bang for your bucks. Not only does this save you money in the long run, it also helps your team plan future campaigns that are poised to produce greater results.

Big Benefit #9:  Optimize Multi-Channel Marketing

One of the most visible ways B2C approaches have influenced the buying journey of the B2B customer is through the use of multiple channels. That’s why it’s critical you use your CDP to perpetually monitor your segment data to make sure you have the most current contact information for both customers and prospects. After all, you may have a killer SMS campaign, but if you don’t have the right numbers, titles, names for your targets, your campaign will miss the mark — every time.

In addition to ensuring data is clean and complete, you will also want to note the preferred channels of communication for your targets and create your campaigns around their preferences. One of the greatest and simplest secrets of engagement is this: be where your customers are. If they are on LinkedIn, your blogs, posts and web ads need to be there, too. If they no longer use email, but only use text and voice, then respect their wishes by sending them communications on the channels they are using. This approach of catering to customer preferences may seem like a customer-centric approach at-first, but it’s equally beneficial for your business as it allows you to invest your marketing dollars into the channels that are reaching your targets.