Advanced Segmentation Is More Accessible Than Ever

How Artificial Intelligence Is Making Segmentation Faster, Easier, and Cheaper

The relationship between sales and marketing is in constant flux. Marketing is now expected to deliver “hotter” prequalified leads to sales, all while taking greater responsibility for more of the sales funnel. With the rise in marketing automation, much of what used to be exclusively the responsibility of sales is now being shared with marketing. How can marketers effectively fill this growing role? Advanced segmentation is part of the answer.

Advanced Segmentation to the Next Level

Most marketers already use some form of segmentation while targeting prospects and customers. Between Facebook target, Google Ads, Newsletter / Automations, and on, and on, it’s become second nature for us to do some form segmenting. However, advanced segmentation is the secret lever to massively increased results hiding in plain sight. This is where you qualify leads using multiple conditions or combinations of data points, such as purchasing power, gender, location, age, and more. It’s Pareto’s principle (the “80/20 rule”) in action: if 20 percent of your audience is responsible for 80% of your results – why not market to them more specifically. Done right, advanced segmentation offers fantastic return on investment (ROI) and can be a powerful tool in any marketer’s arsenal. It helps you to identify leads that have the highest potential to convert, thus helping to effectively focus your time, energy, and money on the most valuable prospects. “Sometimes people think segmentation is a very advanced type of thing that they have to do in marketing, and it really doesn’t have to be,” says Raj Khera, executive vice-president and chief marketing officer at Wealth Engine, an organization that provides customer segmentation and modeling to nonprofits and financial services companies. “If you’re not doing advanced segmentation, your competitor’s going to do it, and they will eat your lunch.”

The Need for Advanced Segmentation Today

The COVID-19 pandemic has been brutal on many industries. At a time like this, a company’s financial survival demands that resources are utilized to ensure optimal results. Using advanced segmentation to identify your best prospects can be a game changer. “If you have limited resources, you have to figure out how you and your team spend their time,” says Khera. “You want to spend your sales cycles focusing on folks who can give you bigger donations, who can buy the most from you, or who have the intent to buy the most from you, as opposed to folks who might not really be interested.” A few key examples:

• LeadEnforce: allows you to add sources on various social media including Facebook pages to create truly custom audiences that use those sources and you can create lookalike audiences to expand your reach of that segment.
• OptinMonster: lead generation software with a bevy of forms including gamification. The advanced segmentation is put into your hands by allowing you to segment your audience through options including Referrer Detection which targets offers by referral source. Device-Based Targeting to selectively show your promotions to subscribers use desktops, tablets or smartphones.
• ZoomInfo: one of the largest business to business customer data sources. Not only can you do geographic filters by title and industry, you can even do technographic filtration to search by the kind of software a firm and their staff uses.
• WealthEngine: fundraisers and brands can research prospective donors and customers by wealth as well further increase their win-rate with wealth screening, analysis, predictive analytics, and predictive modeling.

Automating Advanced Segmentation

The potential outcomes of advanced segmentation are very lucrative, but scaling advanced segmentation has remained scant for most marketers. Collecting the required data points manually used to be difficult and time consuming. Tools that automated the process were prohibitively expensive. With the rise in automation tools and reliance on artificial intelligence (AI), advanced segmentation at scale and speed has become much more accessible. It can be as simple as deciding the most choice characteristics to target and the best tool to do that work For instance, Wealth Engine, just one of many tools available for advanced segmentation, has profiled about 240 million Americans based on publicly available information. Their system automatically screens these profiles and creates relevant segments for their nonprofit customers. Based on AI-processed data, these segments help the nonprofits identify which donors to contact for annual gifts, major gifts, or other appropriate campaigns. “AI is the future, and it’s not scary once you get into it,” says Khera. “Most of the advanced segmentation tools are very simple to use.” Want to hear even more from Khera? Check out this episode of the Marketing Minute featuring his insights.) As expectations for marketing continue to rise, turning to the right automation tools can help marketers meet those expectations with ease. Are you attempting to conduct your own prospect segmentation? Feeling a bit lost? Reach out to us today. We’re a digital marketing agency of record for growing brands leveraging our years of experience and expertise to increase your leads and sales and to get further in front of your ideal audience online. Let’s connect!