Tag Archive for: Segmentation

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Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Database Segmentation

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Database Segmentation

Database Segmentation: its meaning and how to apply it. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Many small businesses use tracking services to find information about their prospects or leads, be it contact information, age and gender, or even things like their buying behavior. Database segmentation refers to the organization of that data in a way that can then influence outreach such as email marketing campaigns, or strategic company decisions like selecting new product lines or determining pricing strategies. A few examples of ways to segment your data could be…

Lead quality – Within marketing automation software, leads can earn a score. Ten points for opening an email, 100 points for downloading content, 500 points for watching an entire video, etc. Lead qualification is a great way to segment. You could have different buckets according to lead score (i.e. 0-100 score, 101-500 score, 501-1000 score).

Ideal Buyers – Who are your ideal customers? Do they have certain job titles, company sizes, demographics or criteria. Ask your sales people, and then utilize your database segmentation tools. Once you’ve done that, you will be able to treat that group differently than you would a group that may not be as inclined to consume your product or services.

Geography  – Maybe certain areas of the world are more important to you than others. Or perhaps they should just receive separate content that is specific to their region. The folks down in Austin might need to know when your new barbecue recipe is available, whereas the crowd up in Chicago are more interested in when your winter boots are on clearance.

What’s even better (and more effective) is that you can then combine these! Perhaps you would like to send a handwritten letter & company t-shirt out to only your highest scoring leads in California. If you’ve utilized the data segmentation features within your marketing automation tool, you can get that personalized content out to that specific group of prospects in no time.

Learn more about Database Segmentation!

Lead Liaison

Marketing Segmentation and Personalization for Clients

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Marketing SegmentationIs marketing segmentation necessary to a successful advertising campaign? Not necessarily. Success is based on generating ROI – bringing in enough revenue to cover your advertising expenses and overhead while retaining a profit. That’s the bottom line for most advertising campaigns –right?

Well, not necessarily. If you’re running a successful advertising campaign, return is imminent. At the same time, businesses who are successfully marketing should always be taking steps to deepen their marketing funnels and ensure marketing segmentation reaches users in a way that encourages conversion. Many business owners are so wrapped up in their day-to-day business operations that deepening marketing segments is last on their lists.

More Intimate Marketing Segmentation

Establishing trust with your user base or customers is in some cases about deepening intimacy. By deepening intimacy you’re basically approaching users in a way that identifies with their unique needs right away.  When customers get marketing from you, they should feel like you’re speaking to their specific needs. The more you can establish that intimacy and create a more personalized experience, the higher your likelihood of conversion. If you’re prepared to work with marketing segmentation, you can find opportunities to create more intimate and personalized marketing materials with less hassle.

Establishing Personalization in Marketing

Marketing segmentation helps you establish personalization by knowing who you’re talking to. In order to understand the different segmented needs of your audience, you’ll need to understand the audience and what needs set them apart. For instance, if you sell a beauty product that’s mostly used by teens and women in their early 20s, you have two separate buying markets: Younger women and the parents of teens.

Knowing this information, you can look back at analytics or at your marketing automation to get an idea of who’s visiting your website and materials based on what channels. You might find that most of the teens find you via Instagram and buying parents open most of your emails. Knowing this, you can craft customized marketing materials for these networks and test those materials over time.

Once you’ve worked with marketing segmentation and sent out personalized messaging, you can continue to work with modifying that messaging over time to bring in higher conversion rates. You can continue sending out comprehensive marketing messaging to your entire client list while you’re doing this, ensuring multiple opportunities for your audience to buy while retaining personalization.

If you need some help decoding your marketing segmentation, give us a call! Lead Liaison’s marketing automation dashboard makes marketing segmentation a snap. Let us tell you more!

Lead Liaison

Sales Funnel Management vs. the Holidays

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Sales Funnel Management vs. the HolidaysThere’s something about the holidays that tends to throw sales funnel management off a little bit. Because traffic typically slows during the holiday, the accumulation of sales data often goes unmanaged well into the new year. Employees are off doing their own thing with their families, and oftentimes the vacation isn’t enough to make full alertness and appreciation for work a possibility when they return to their desks in January.

If your business is going well for you – or even if it’s not – you may already have a workflow in place for collecting and interpreting data. Businesses who experience a slow time of year in January are often in a good position to modify their tracking and workflow for better sales funnel management. However, what do you do if the holidays slow your team down so significantly that your holiday data is never truly looked at?

Segment, Segment, Segment

One of the biggest issues most businesses have with sales funnel management during the holidays is the time factor. Particularly if your business tends to be rather slow during the holidays, traffic and page use can be glossed over in a way that robs you of valuable sales funnel management data. This data can give you insight into how you should change your website or your product offerings for success during the new year.

If this is happening, segment the data. Ask your team to prepare two special meetings  – one that focuses entirely on holiday data (and not just MoM ‘month over month’ for December data!) to get an idea of how the “holiday mind” can result in different usage of your website over time.

Streamlining Sales Funnel Management

Many businesses don’t factor in the differences between how “holiday-minded” users view their sites and how this type of traffic varies over the rest of the year. Again, rather than thinking in a MoM data collection space, it’s important to compare traffic during the weeks leading up to the holidays with traffic for the rest of the year.

You may find that the data is telling you to significantly change up your workflow, monitoring and conversion optimization processes before the holiday hits. Paying attention to your data at the granular level –whether site visits, page usage or form fill-outs – can help you design a work flow process that better accommodates time off and work flow for the holiday season.

Marketing automation can do all this for you – there’s no need to dig up holiday data when it’s presented to you cleanly in an easy-to-use dashboard. Talk to the Lead Liaison experts today about how we can help with your holiday sales funnel management!

Lead Liaison

Creating Business Content Through Segmentation

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Creating Business Content Through SegmentationAs you’re reading this, small businesses are out there creating business content. Many of them are harvesting content that’s been contracted to external sources. Some are repurposing content that’s been written before, or using automation services to reimagine content from another business. Some are developing a careful content strategy that uses available business resources and a calendar. Some aren’t worried about their content strategy at all.

Upon first glance, the businesses that are leveraging zero to minimum new content in their businesses are the ones that appear the least competitive. However, the effort it takes to create business content does not always guarantee success. If you’re not segmenting you content to match the buying cycle of your users, your content could be deleted, passed over or generally disregarded each time you get a site visit or send a newsletter. And as most business owners out there know, wasted effort is wasted money.

Creating Business Content that Works

According to Social Media B2B, only 30% of companies generally categorize the content they have to offer based on their customer’s average buying cycle. This means that regardless of what buying stage customers are in, they’re getting the same content as everyone else.

Ask yourself this – does someone who’s already purchased need to be convinced to become a first-time customer? Wouldn’t it be better for customers who’ve made a purchase to get new offers or ‘returning customer’ specials? What about referrals?

If you haven’t segmented these different ways of looking at how your customers buy and what content they’d like to see, now is a great time to start.

The Benefits of Segmentation

Creating the right business content based on your customer buying cycle is about first understanding your cycle, then knowing how to segment your audience. If you don’t understand your cycle, marketing automation is a great way to get acquainted with how people are finding you and how to address each audience’s different needs.

Once you have that base set up, take a look at how you can break your customers into different audiences based on how and when they buy. Do you find that customers choose to go with you 8-10 days after you begin advertising? Then you should start sending customized emails to a deciding client segment within a week of initial contact. What about email marketing? If new clients don’t ever seem to open emails, segment your email list into a ‘returning’ or ‘current client’ list that gets special offers and information about your business.

If you don’t know how to begin the buying cycle definition or segmentation process, marketing automation services can help you. At Lead Liaison, we strive to help you understand your buying cycle with advanced tools and marketing data. Talk to us today about how we can help get your business to the next step!