While segmentation is not a new concept in marketing, the growing complexities in B2B marketing has driven successful marketers to take more of a holistic look at the characteristics of their prospects beyond the basic, one-dimensional demographic profiles that have been used in the past. There are multiple characteristics that can be used to group a large database into personas, and there are several questions to ask yourself when creating these personas.

Who Are They?

Demographics

Demographics are the traditional characteristics that are used to segment an audience. Sample categories of demographics used to create personas in B2B marketing include title, industry, stage in sales funnel and decision-making ability. There is an endless amount of categories that can be used, depending on the nature of your product or service.

Psychographics

While demographics are quantifiable characteristics, psychographics are more abstract categories that reflect the values, opinions and attitudes your audience holds. While psychographics are not as common in B2B marketing as they are in B2C marketing, it is important to remember that B2B buyers are still humans who vary in terms of their beliefs and values. Understanding these psychographic qualities and utilizing them to reach your audience can help to set your company apart from the competition.

Habits

In order to have a well-rounded picture of your persona, it is important to understand certain behavioral habits in addition to demographic and psychographic information. Specifically, what types of media do they typically consume and when do they consume it? This is essential to know in order to effectively reach them. If your audience primarily consumes information by web searches, for example, it would be a good idea to invest in SEO or pay-per-click marketing. Understanding when they use various media is also important, as an email sent at 8:30am on a Monday may not be as successful as one sent on Thursday at 3:00pm, depending on your audience.

What Do They Need?

By having an understanding of your persona’s key concerns or painpoints, you can better target your message to illustrate how your product or service addresses them. Addressing a prospective customer’s specific concern shows that you value them, because you have taken the time to understand their needs.

These concerns could be anything from their current solution not fully addressing their needs to not having the resources available internally to successfully complete a task. For the latter painpoint, if you are a service provider, you may position your company as a partner who can fill the shoes of an in-house team, only with better results and less investment required. For the former, you may want to illustrate the ways in which your solution would fully address their needs.

What Are They Doing Now?

The relationship that a persona currently has with your company is another characteristic that can be used to segment an audience. As an example, your tactics and messaging will vary when reaching a current customer versus someone who is not even aware of your company. In the latter case, you will need to educate the prospect on the benefits of your products or services, while you may need to guide current customers through an implementation process and offer continual support and updates. It is important to segment groups by their relationship with your company in order to effectively reach each of them without alienating the others.

By understanding the various characteristics for each of your personas, you can be more effective and efficient with your marketing campaigns. If you are working with a large content library, it is helpful to map your existing content to the personas that you uncover. This way, you can see any holes that you may have and will know exactly which piece of content to use in your next touch.

Unfortunately, only about 35% of B2B marketers are using personas to guide their content creation process. By keeping your personas in mind throughout a B2B marketing campaign’s development and execution, you can gain a leg up on your competition and reach a larger portion of your target audience more personally, leading to increased campaign success.

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While marketing automation can be a useful tool, it can be easy to focus on the “automation” aspect and forget about the “marketing” part. To be successful, marketing automation requires more than setting up the system to automate actions. While marketing automation helps to automate the process, you will still have to make the decisions as to the best steps to take, based on the marketing knowledge you already have. Specifically, there are four marketing fundamentals that must be remembered during a marketing automation implementation.

1. Content

In order for people to respond to your sales messages, you need to offer them something of value. Compelling, relevant content, as opposed to traditional, “salesy” materials, helps to build a sense of trust with your brand, puts prospects at ease and increases the likelihood that they will pay attention to your messages.

For content to be successful, it is important to make sure that it is highly targeted to your prospects’ interests. By targeting your content to prospects’ industry, job function or other factors, you increase the likelihood that they will find value from it. According to research firm MarketingSherpa 82% of prospects say content targeted to their specific industry is more valuable and 67% say content targeted to their job function is more valuable.

2. Timing

It is essential to ensure that the timing of your touches are at the optimal frequency, reaching prospects enough to stay top-of-mind but not annoying or overwhelming them by reaching them too often. This balance varies, and it is up to you to determine if you need to make adjustments based on key metrics such as bounce and unsubscribe rates.

Determining the best day and time of day to reach your specific audience is also important. Some segments may be more apt to read your emails first thing in the morning, while other may do so around lunchtime. Uncovering the optimal day and time of day can improve the results of your marketing significantly.

3. Segmentation

Much like you (hopefully) segment your audience for other marketing tactics, segmenting your audience is vital for success using marketing automation. As discussed previously, most prospects agree that they want to receive content that is targeted to their interests. In order to do so, it is important that you are segmenting your audience into enough groups that you are able to reach them with relevant messages.

4. Testing

Just like all other marketing campaigns, in order to continue to improve the results of a marketing automation campaign, it is important to continually test aspects of the campaign. The three fundamentals discussed above are all aspects of a campaign that can (and should) be tested.

Every audience will have their own nuances and preferences. While it is important to go into an implementation while keeping in mind best practices, you never know if you may be able to achieve greater results unless you are testing.

As you can see, marketing automation is not as different from traditional marketing as you may think. You still have to continually analyze the results you see and remain involved in the overall strategy of an implementation. By integrating your existing marketing knowledge, it is possible to improve the results of a marketing automation implementation drastically.

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When you look at stats collected from various sources, it proves that lead nurturing programs are a definite necessity, since many qualified leads turn out to be longer-term opportunities, versus immediate sales. So, the question is not “should I have a nurturing program?” and instead is “what do I need to do to create the most effective lead nurturing program?”

Here are five points to consider when creating your lead nurturing program:

• Define and Segment Your Audience: To setup a successful nurturing program, you must first understand your audience. To do this, you will need to think about new leads, as well as dig deep into your current leads, map out the different stages of the buying cycle and key criteria that defines each stage, identify areas of interest and create nurturing segments based on what is uncovered.
• Set Program Goals: It is important to identify the goal of your nurturing program up front and the actions that you want your different lead segments to take as they progress down the pipeline. Remember to vary offerings throughout communications to make sure you appeal to a variety of interests and always keep your offerings relevant.
• Personalize Your Messaging: Grouping leads based on their stage in the buying cycle and preferences will enable you to tailor messaging to appeal to their unique interests. The more tailored your message, the better the program will perform.
• Determine the Mix of Activities: In general, people respond to different types of communications. It is because of this that it is important to define a diverse mix of integrated activities as part of your nurturing program.
• Establish the Frequency of Communications: For your lead nurturing program, you will need to determine a communication frequency that will align with your leads’ preferences. In addition to regularly scheduled communications, you should also map out actions that will trigger communications based on a lead’s activities. While communication frequency may vary across segments, the time between scheduled emails should remain as consistent as possible.