How Do You Segment?

At Marketo we segment by company size; those with >750 employees are the Enterprise segment, while smaller companies make up the Commercial segment. Additionally we segment by verticals too- e.g. Financial Services, Healthcare and Higher Education. Lastly, and most importantly, we segment by customers/prospects.

Hi Shea,

The answer to this question deeply depends on your business and it's impossible to deduce it from what other are doing.

It can be by any criteria that makes sense based on how sales are considering the business. Vyoma is porposiing a way that is in fact mapped to the sales organization, but it can also be based on the relationship with your company (prospects vs. customers) or by suit sopt for various offering, by lead maturity, etc...

-Greg

As said above this depends a lot on your business and the data you have available. To add to what was previously said, you could segment on different product/services of interest, nurture stage, relationship etc.

Shea,

I love this question! Although vague, and keeping in mind the huge variance in industries and businesses, this is an example of a question that someone would chit-chat on at Summit and bounce around ideas that could really open up new options in instances and campaigns.

We see lots of variety - from industry, revenue, employee number, sales territory, type (customer, prospect, partner, etc.), and more. Something that could help when you're just bouncing around ideas is to pull closed won data (in SFDC or wherever you can access this). Pull in as many "attributes" or fields as possible and export and look for trends. This is a great place to start when thinking about lead scoring, persona's, dynamic content, etc.

Happy Monday!

Kim

We are primarily B2C, high-involvement purchases with lots of touchpoints and no outbound sales (only inbound calls and website bookings). So we mostly segment by propensity to buy, based on lead scoring tracking people's interaction with our content.

High interaction means they are likely to be fine with more content, more frequently, and more sales-focussed. Those without much activity will prefer more blog content which isn't too "pushy".

We overlay that with "product of interest" segmentations and shortly, with 1:1 predictive content through a vendor. We also use email scripting to personalise our communications.

Agree with the comments above that it's highly individual to your business. What are the key breakpoints you see in the data? What are the key milestones? You should then start to see logical groups that make sense. But increasingly, we are only using segmentations for acquisition, when we don't have behaviour to track and personalise with. Once users are interacting with your content, individual rule-based segments become much less powerful compared to 1:1 recommendations.