Know your customers I: Segmentation

This article kicks off a new series of marketing and sales tips for self-employed professionals and small businesses. Subscribe to our blog or Twitter feed to receive future installments.

The secret to generating revenues is creating an end-to-end integrated marketing and sales process. This Know Your Customers series will show how that happens.

The more you know about your contacts, prospects, and customers, the better you can tailor your messaging, communications, and products to increase sales. One technique is segmentation. There are many ways types of  segments. The key is finding the ones that naturally divide your prospects by person and company and enable more targeted one-to-one marketing.

Typical B2B segments include:

• Location
• Industry
• Market
• Professional
• Organizational title

Segmentation is developed at the beginning of marketing and sales planning where your Market definition describes a target customer. If you don’t have a formal marketing plan, take your best shot and define one. Then look to your actual customers. You may find reality different from your original customer notions. If they diverge, update your target customer profile to match who actually is buying your product.

WeMeUs Contact Management and Lead Generation provides robust tag and group management so you can store segmentation data on your leads and customers.

• Tags. Create a unique tag for each segment option. The tag name should be composed of the generic segment name followed by the individual segment to make them easy to find, such as LocationChicago and LocationMiami. You can use the Tag Manager to enter segments, or just enter each segment as a tag on its first use. The Tag Selector maintains a list of all tags you’ve used in the past. You can apply tags on an individual contact record, a group, or selection of multiple contacts.
• Groups. Create groups with affiliated tags for segments that you will be regularly searching or sending custom emails to.

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