Segmenting Your Audience For Success

Every buyer has different needs. The reason a startup organization buys your product is going to be vastly different from the reason an enterprise company makes the same purchase. Just because companies of different sizes, industries, or budgets can all find value in your product does not mean the same messaging will resonate with each audience. 

As the saying goes, “marketing to everyone is marketing to no one.”

Similar to how a salesperson tailors their pitch to the prospect, audience segmentation allows marketers to tailor their message to different audiences. This ensures that the right customers are seeing the right message at the right time. If you want to convert your best-fit customers, audience segmentation is key.

Let’s dive into an example… 

Notion has a ton of different use cases – from project management to wikis and document sharing. While their ads featured a variety of use cases meticulously segmented by persona, Notion’s landing pages were not personalized to match the audience arriving on-site.

They relied on generic copy to convert customers regardless of who they were or where they came from. As a result, their conversion rate suffered. To combat this, the Notion team started creating personalized landing pages based on the ads users see. By adding audience segmentation and dynamically changing the landing page based on the ad seen. As a result, they were able to boost signups by 60% in just 3-weeks and lower their cost per lead. 

This is just a simple example of why it's important to segment your audiences and show them relevant experiences across all your marketing channels.

But where do you begin? Great question – and one you'll get the answer to in the next section!

Getting started with audience segmentation

So where do you begin? How do you determine where to draw the line and start segmenting audiences? 

You could keep it simple and focus on common segments like the following:

Company size ➡️ Enterprise, Startup

Industry vertical ➡️ Healthcare, Finance, Retail

Paid Segments ➡️ UTMs, Devices

Buying Stages ➡️ Awareness, Evaluation, Free Users, Paid Users

But like any good marketing strategy, it depends. And when it comes to defining the best segmentation for your company, it all depends on your GTM motion. Keep reading to learn how to define the segments that matter most for your GTM motion.

Learn which audience segments matter most for your GTM motion

Similar to the work we did in Chapter 1 to find our buyer personas, let’s go over how to create dimensions for audience segmentation. It’s time to grab some of your favorite sales reps and put your interview hat on, we need their key insight into our ideal buyers. 

The key to audience segmentation is making sure you’re prioritizing the right audiences. To do that, you need a clear understanding of your GTM motion and the prospects most likely to buy. 

Questions to ask your sales team:

1. What does our ideal customer look like? Describe them to me.

2. What kind of companies move a lot faster and smoother in your sales process? What do these companies have in common?

3. What are some of the biggest, most promising accounts you are prospecting right now? Or which have the most long-term expansion potential? 

4. What does the typical buying process look like? Who is involved?

5. What makes a lead a “good” lead? A “bad” lead?

6. What are a few of the most commonly asked questions?

These questions can help you get a better understanding of account and persona firmographics the foundational data needed for audience segmentation.

We've put together a template to help you get this done super easily – The Sale Team Interview Template that will help you keep track of all your answers so they can be distilled quickly and easily.

Note: this template is only available to members of M2, our private community of revenue-focused marketers. Login to get access.

Not a member of M2 yet? Join today to get access to all our templates, plus detailed workshops led by practitioners, a private slack channel, curated job board, and exclusive events.

🏆 End goal: 

A clear framework to define your most important audience segments based on your GTM motion.

🔥 Hot Tip: 

Check out our 30-in-30 Framework to get ideas on how to quickly launch and test different audience segments.

Cross-reference with your CRM

Now that we have qualitative seller insight, you can use the quantitative data found in your CRM to help you validate assumptions and build your ideal audience segments. 

Assuming you have reliable data to work with, your CRM can tell you a lot about who your best customers are.  

To keep your research focused and avoid going down a rabbit hole of CRM data analysis, start by looking at your current customer list. 

• More than 100+ customers? Consider refining the list down to those that purchased in the last 6-12 months. 

• Less than 100 customers? Consider broadening your search to include accounts that became a qualified deal in the last 6-12 months.

Once you have your list of accounts, start comparing them to find patterns across key dimensions like:

• Industry

• Employee Size

• Revenue

• Technology Used

• HQ Location

• Contacts per deal

• Personas

We've put together a Ideal Buyer Dimensions template that you can use to begin identifying patterns in your customer base to better inform your segmentation strategy.

Not a member of M2 yet? Join today to get access to all our templates, plus detailed workshops led by practitioners, a private slack channel, curated job board, and exclusive events.

🔥 Hot Tip: 

Adjust our worksheet to focus on the dimensions that mean the most to your company. Need to know things like country, company verticals, company types (non-profit, private, education, etc.) add them to this worksheet. 

Identify your primary segmentation

Now that we’ve validated our audience segments, let’s identify our primary segmentation dimensions. For this section, we’re going to select the most important company-level and persona-level segments to focus on.

Starting with the list of dimensions above (industry, size, etc.), identify the two most important dimensions. These will act as the company-level segmentation. 

Ex. Company-level dimensions:

• Company size

• Industry vertical

After we have our company-level dimensions we’ll want to define persona-level dimensions. (We defined these in Chapter 1.)

Ex. Persona-level dimensions:

• Role / title

Put your 2 company-level dimensions and your 1 persona-level dimension together and you have your primary audience segmentation. It will look something like this:

Remember, the goal is to create a clear but simple framework for your audience segmentation—don’t over do it. 

🏆 End goal: 

A clear understanding of your primary segmentation dimensions. 

🔥 Hot Tip: 

This should feel like putting the final pieces of a puzzle into place. We’ve been building up to this, no need to overthink it. 

Need more inspiration?

Looking for more resources to help you define your primary segmentation dimensions? Here are some additional posts for more inspiration:

• How Sprig built a personalized buyer journey for every company size

• The 30 in 30 Website Personalization Framework: Launch 30 experiments in 30 days

Now you’ve got your primary segmentation all figured out, nice work! 🙌

Now it’s time to build messaging around each of these dimensions so that the marketing messaging you come up with matches their pain points exactly. 

Chapter 3 will be released soon.

In the meantime, book a time with a Conversion Specialist to see how high-performing B2B companies like 6sense, Snowflake, and Autodesk are applying these concepts to hit their growth goals by converting more website visitors into pipeline by focusing on conversion.