Segmenting by Department/Function. Best approach?

Question

Our marketing team wants to target their marketing efforts towards four functional groups / departments within a company, I.T., Security, Operations, and BC/DR. We are trying to think of the best way to create a segmentation that categorizes and buckets our database based on these four groups, but have yet to find a perfect solution.

Here's the three way's we've thought of...

Build out segmentation that filters on keywords within job titles
- Requires lots of manual work at the beginning, being able to determine keywords and job titles to filter on for each segment/bucket
Use a third party database tool to append the department level data
- Won't be able to match 100% of our database which leaves a gap, and the department values they give us do not necessarily align with the four areas we want to target
Add a new field on our forms/in our DB, and allow BDR/Sales to update that field when adding directly to the CRM
- We already have a lot of fields on our forms and are concerned about form drop-off because of all the fields

How have others been able to filter/segment on department-level data? Any other way I haven't thought of? Any way that works best for you?

Josh_Hill13 · Answer

Those are all good solutions that everyone does.

There are probably third party tools to provide that keyword matching. Or just get an intern to match up Titles to Depts and run the Segmentation.

In Marketo, the work is always somewhere. You should look at how scalable future updates are and how to reduce manual work going forward.

As for your Forms, you can either use the Segmentation or a Data Processor to take Titles. Or you can shorten the form and focus on your buckets. Keep in mind that the way you think about the world may not be how your audience thinks of themselves. Asking for Job Title may be more accurate.

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