What’s in your database?
Data is truly magnificent. A plethora of information just waiting to be choreographed in the pursuit of marketing excellence. It is true that a database can be unwieldy and slightly daunting. Data is complex and multi-layered, which is why it can appear formidable. On the flip side, used well, data can open doors to a myriad of superb marketing opportunities leading to sales conversion for a stupendous pipeline.
Good B2B marketers knows that a deep understanding of customers is vital to effective lead generation. The human-to-human connection is vital when trying to develop connections with your target audience. Developing this deep understanding doesn’t have to be done face-to-face, a huge amount of customer insight can be gained from data analysis before sales conversations even begin to take place. And, so it should.
Spending time to analysing data can supercharge your content strategy and deliver maximum client value through targeted, personalised marketing. This is where the true value of microsegmentation comes in to play.
What is exactly is microsegmentation? Segmentation is the practice of dividing customer data into segments, usually based on broad factors such as geography, company size and industry. Microsegmentation further breaks data down into much smaller and more detailed segments based on more specific demographics, e.g. buying behaviours, psychographics, and geographic factors. Not all these factors will be relevant, but if you have the data at your disposal it makes sense to use and benefit from it.
Understanding your data means that analysing and manipulating it will be more straightforward and creating compelling content for targeted marketing will be simpler and will deliver better results.
Demographics
Demographics covers a wide range of variables such as gender, marital status, age, level of education, occupation, primary language, income level, religion, nationality, and socio-economic status.
Buying behaviours Buying behaviours can be easily tracked online. You should analyse elements such as brand loyalty and purchasing cycles to understand the main drivers behind purchasing decisions and, for example, how you can be more like your competitors to attract new business.
Psychographic segmentation
Psychographic factors refer to beliefs, attitudes, and values. These are hard to capture but if you can they contain a hugely impactful area of information. Questions to ask include: What is the social status or perceived social status of your ideal customer? Do they make buying decisions entirely based on budget and value, or are they more relationship-driven? Psychographics also refer to the personality and lifestyle of your target market, key factors in assessing how, when, where and with what to target them.
Geographical segmentation
This doesn’t simply relate to physical geographic data such as region, topography (e.g. for products related to mountainous regions with severe weather or areas at flood risk) and human geographical instances. Consider socio-geographic information such as unemployment rates or commuting times, which would be relevant in how you interact with prospects/customers. For example, people with a long commute can be targeted with podcast-based content and those that live in areas with high-unemployment would be ripe for recruitment marketing. If you begin to delve deeper into your data it will reveal a wealth of statistics, details, specifics, and evidence that can inform your marketing strategy and campaigns for the better.
How does microsegmentation help marketers do their job?
With all the clever technologies at our disposal, microsegmentation has never been easier. Data can be collected and stored using machine learning and AI and processed via marketing automation on a large scale to help boost workflow processes and marketing.
Creating compelling content, which is highly relevant and informative, is vital to cultivating long term, positive customer relationships. Building this sort of trust and longevity can only be done via an in-depth understanding of your customers at the most minute level.
Creating compelling content?
Microsegmenting your database allows you to use the specific information gleaned to create highly engaging, personalised, and relevant content which you can deliver to your target audience at an appropriate time.
eMarketing remains the most effective way to stay in touch with your target audience but this should be combined with telemarketing, digital and social media marketing and, on occasion and where relevant, direct mail. To succeed at email marketing, you must ensure you develop content that is personalised, relevant, informative and interesting. Use your opportunities to create trust and build relationships which should avoid the unsubscribe button being hit. If you have segmented effectively and have targeted the right audience with the right content at the right time, trust and brand loyalty will follow.
Hidden gems
Unanalysed data is full of hidden gems. ProspectBase’s data-driven approach is underpinned by microsegmentation. Our data is fully mapped making microsegmentation a cinch. We map data by sizing, vertical, hardware, renewals, and install data (to name a few). ProspectaBase data scientists focus on enriching data to target the right prospects for our clients. We work with clients to focus on the real benefits of gaining a deep understanding of customer data, drilling down into the minutiae of the detail, and developing buying personas to supercharge marketing campaigns. By helping our clients to understand the hidden gems in their data (or ours) we take their marketing strategies to the next level.
PureData is a data service from ProspectaBase that delivers clean and intelligent B2B marketing data for clients that carry out external digital content syndication via web forms or events badge scans. The service eliminates ‘mickey mouse’ form fills to avoid compliance issues and injects only the most pure and accurate B2B data to a client’s CRM. PureData not only turns dirty data into clean data, it also adds infrastructure intelligence to create intelligence rich leads for marketing.
We regularly undertake data discovery projects for clients. How does this work? We take client data, put it through the ProspectaBase matching tool and manipulate and augment it to create a precise and targeted prospect list.
Conclusion
In our experience, the best way to remain competitive is by obtaining accurate data, taking a microsegmentation approach and analysing the data thoroughly to fully understand customer needs. Once this understanding is attained you can deliver true value by creating compelling content and delivering this to your prospects and customers via a combined digital marketing approach of account-based marketing and multi-touch marketing.
Microsegmentation can take marketing to the next level. Adoption of such techniques will prove to your client base that you truly “get it”, that you truly understand their needs and can meet their requirements. Data analysis and microsegmentation are key to discovering patterns of information that allow you to create high-quality, targeted campaigns containing compelling content that will increase sales conversions.
Our advice? Don’t waste time on rubbish data. Obtain the best data you can and then segment, analyse, and manipulate to make it work for you.
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