B2B Customer Segmentation Models:
Most Useful Practices to Follow
Have you been searching for B2B customer segmentation examples?
Personalization and customization of products and services couldn’t be easier with modern technologies. Customers themselves are searching for companies that can provide this type of experience.
As research shows, 77% of B2B marketing professionals agree on the fact, that personalized client experience leads to better relationships with them. For this reason, many businesses turn to b2b customer segmentation as the tool to reach that level of care for their clientele.
Customer Segmentation B2B: Explained
Customer segmentation is a delicate process of dividing your base of clients into specific groups or categories (segments) according to special common characteristics. This allows businesses to better cater their efforts to the customers’ needs, providing that customized experience they look for.
A b2b customer segment can be formed based on several categories:
- demographics that can include language, location, or a job position;
- behavioral categories, such as purchase history or adoption of specific features
- company size, revenue, and industry which are all parts of firmographics
- customer wants and needs
- knowledge, meaning how well-informed your customers are about the product or service
- product usage – the clients’ level of engagement with the company’s features
- and a customer (ideal) profile fit which means rating prospects according to their intention of buying from your company
The Importance of B2B Customer Segmentation
Why are b2b customer segmentation examples so important? What do they bring to the table?
It’s not only about personalization (though it’s one of the main points). Aside from that, breaking your clientele into smaller groups has more benefits for the business than you think:
- Understanding your customers. These segments make it easier to conduct proper research and find all the important information for building your advertisement campaigns and brand name in general.
- Better targeting. With the help of b2b segmentation, you can cater directly to your customer’s needs, and, therefore, develop highly targeted marketing campaigns.
- A clear vision of expansion. Having segmented your customer base, you can identify groups that are still not that connected with the company. Thus, you can focus o reaching out to them as well.
- Improvement of customer support. Call center outsourcing service and all support teams can utilize segmentation to better understand what issues your customers may have and which tools they can send them to solve the problems.
Generally, when you reach that deep understanding of your audience, you can customize your service, diversify your products, and just improve that customer experience.
Working B2B Customer Segmentation Examples
No, let’s move on to the different b2b customer segmentation models. All businesses are different, and they require some adjustment of these examples according to their objectives.
However, we have collected the most universal practices, that can be useful for companies of all sizes and directions.
Data Collection, Update & Sync
For a successful segmentation, companies need to acquire quality and quantity data about their customers. Here, there’s only one rule—collect everything you can. However, don’t forget to use relevant sources.
Besides, keep all the information up to date. Only then it will be useful for the integration into your workflow.
Actionable Data Focus
Collection of all the data is a useful thing, however, don’t forget why you are doing it. You need information that then can be used for segmentation. So, if you want to divide your clients into groups based on the behavior, don’t go and collect everything about their demographics.
Segmentation Balance
First of all, you need to fill in all the right segmented boxes, which will depend on the objectives of your company. Secondly, don’t overuse your resources too much. You need to be able to manage customer information both quickly and effectively.
Customer Journey Optimization
To make maximum use of the process, connect your segmentation data with the appropriate stages of your customers’ journey. You should have a working outlined journey map, that will let you sync data from all departments and cover your whole interaction with clients from the beginning to the end.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, after seeing all these customer segmentation b2b practices, you can now know how to apply them to your company. After all, it’s a key to expanding your customer base to the max.
If you want to have a clearer understanding of the segments in your business, don’t hesitate to contact the specialists in the field. This way you will surely make the right model choice.