If you plan on converting leads into customers or buyers, efficient lead targeting and segmentation must be at the core of your marketing strategy. Whatever business you’re in, your target consumers will be a diverse group of people with varying wants, which will alter as they progress through the buying process and get closer to making a purchase. 

You should segment your leads at the time of capture and on an ongoing basis as their relationship with your brand changes. This will allow you to offer messaging to each of these prospects, meeting their individual needs at each stage of the sales process.

What is lead segmentation?

In order to efficiently and effectively target leads, you need to properly segment them first. In a nutshell, lead segmentation is the process of dividing your database of leads into smaller groups depending on their behaviors. This, in turn, will allow you to send more persuasive marketing communications – one of the core objectives of an efficient E-CRM.

For example, you have people that have only visited your homepage and left, but you also have people who have browsed through your website, even looked at some of the products. And, hopefully, you have the ones who have added items to the cart but abandoned the purchase, and the ones who have made it all the way to the end and made a purchase. 

Knowing this, you have the freedom and advantage to send different messages to specific groups of visitors. For those who have only visited your homepage, you might want to engage them by pointing them to product list pages. For those who have already browsed some of your products, it may be a good idea to offer them similar products or discounts.

Why is lead targeting important?

When you know your potential customer’s behavior, you can motivate and entice the cart abandonment segment with some promo code or discount – for instance, one that is time restraining in order for them to make a purchase in the next few hours or days. These specific contents and messages are much more effective than sending generalized promotional offers. 

Without lead segmentation you are not addressing specific needs, nor are you demonstrating which problems you’ll solve for them, that is, providing any incentive for customers to choose you above the myriad of other companies offering a similar bundle. According to Venture Harbour CEO, Marcus Taylor, lead segmentation resulted in an 89% sales uplift and 58% increase in average order value for one of their ventures.

How to efficiently target leads

Segmenting and targeting leads using traditional marketing methods can be very time-consuming and often is not so efficiently organized, specially if you are dealing with thousands and thousands of leads. However, today, there are a number of marketing automation tools like Mautic that enable you to automate those tedious tasks and give you more time to focus on creating a successful marketing strategy or on other processes and tasks.

Mautic’s solution provides detailed contact tracking and automates the process of finding and nurturing contacts through landing pages and forms, email campaigns, text messages, web notifications, and integration with your CRM and other systems in a smooth and easy way.

Nikola Radenkovic is a Techical Specialist at Sales Snap. You can follow him on Linkedin and read more of his marketing tips on the Sales Snap blog.

In the days leading up to digital sales and marketing, the term improvisation (or improv), often took the role of the savvy salesperson who was able to think quickly on their feet in a sales presentation, or the marketer who was able to think outside the box. Improv has many attributes, but can automation be one of them?

The Art of Improv

The value that improv provides is the element of surprise and delight. But this value isn’t based on random or arbitrary activity. It’s based on a few core elements that are second nature to the people who are able to deliver it.

• Listening for relevance:
  One of the key elements of improv in a comedy context is that one person needs to listen and truly understand where the other person is leading the dialogue. This is why marketing automation should never be a solo proposition. To be truly effective in improv, you must listen to other actors and determine their role and how you will interact with them. To create moments of improvisation you must first listen.
• Know Your Audience:
  In any field where communication is relied upon to provide value, listening and understanding who you’re speaking to are key. Have they experienced what you’ve experienced? Whether it’s a group of realtors or bodybuilders, what each group finds humorous will be unique. The connections we make with them must reflect our knowledge of who they are.
• Follow the flow:
  When you’re doing improv, it’s necessary that your story have a rhythm or a cadence. It’s in this flow of story that an audience will find connection. If you’ve ever been to an evening of improv, you’ll notice that there is a broader story being told. The flow of a story will ultimately engage you in meaningful ways. Breaking this pattern or flow will leave audiences feeling disconnected.
• Delight with a payoff:
  There are many times throughout an improvisational skit or comedy routine where there’s a moment of delight or a comedic payoff. It often leaves the audience even more engaged and connected to the story being told. This is one of the most important elements of improv. It’s the response that our amygdala reacts to. It’s the part of your brain that helps evaluate if something is memorable and full of delight.

Improv is part art and part science. It’s not something that can simply be calculated or easily produced. It comes with practice and a keen awareness of these elements. Now let’s take a look at each of these elements in the light of how we automate our marketing and communications.

Automating Improv

Automation continues to be seen as a calculated prescription of actions that are a result of someone’s choice. These seem in complete contrast to the ebb and flow of a improv comedy routine. Or are they? Let’s consider the factors of improv that we’ve highlighted and determine if there is a place in our marketing automation for them.

• Listening for relevance:
  One of the things that we often miss when developing our automation workflows is a close relationship with the other functions of our business that provide us with real-time feedback. Integrations become a key way for businesses to assess relevance throughout the entire product lifecycle. Are you working with other teams in your business? If you’re able to check for whether an email has been opened or a link has been clicked, what other actions/activities can provide feedback? Payment received? Order processed? Shipment delivered? Consider what notifications can be leveraged to help you make the most meaningful connection.
• Know Your Audience:
  This seems fairly intuitive. When someone clicks on a link, visits a page or fills out a form, it begins to indicate intent or motivation. Your audience is providing you with all manner of information that will help you learn more about them. Knowing this information gives you information with which to validate interest. Are you leveraging each marketing channel and function in your business to truly understand them?
• Follow the Flow:
  Consider flow akin to your buying journey. One of the real challenges of improv is the ability to combine all of these factors into a relevant story. The same is true of marketing automation. Follow your visitor/customer as they make decisions. As you do, be sure to provide value at each milestone. Allow their decisions and your value to steer them into opportunities for delight.
• Delight with a Payoff:
  We all know that with improv the payoff is the punchline or the big finish. As we consider marketing’s role in engaging our audience and maximizing resources with automation, we must use these tools to engage our audience, not simply move them through a funnel. Whether you are listening for keywords, monitoring for clicks, be intentional by identifying specific segments or customers to provide truly delight filled moments.

Many organizations are joining the marketing automation movement. They’re taking their simple, routine communications and moving them into an automation system. This is not altogether a bad thing. But the opportunity cost may be greater than anticipated if marketing teams don’t find improvisational ways to make automation a value added part of their marketing strategy. Here’s our chance to take the stage and make each interaction one they won’t soon forget.

1. Think like your audience

You know your product. You know what you are working on or the services providing. In fact, you have been eating, sleeping, and breathing your business longer than anyone else. As a result of your personal involvement you have come to identify with certain terms, keywords, and a distinct way of thinking about your business, your product, and the needs your solution meets. This is the first problem you will face. Rather than thinking as the person who has created this amazing business you must think like your audience. When you think like your audience this affects your entire marketing strategy. Everything from the keywords you use in your content marketing to the flow of your campaign workflows within your marketing automation will be affected by the thinking of your target audience.

2. Go where they go

But let’s step back even further. Before you can think like our target audience you need to go where they go. You need to find those locations online (and on social) where your potential customers like to visit. There are several reasons why this step is important. First, by finding and visiting those places where your audience lives you will learn what interests and motivates them. Second, this will help you think like them (see the first point above). When you live a day in someone else’s shoes you have a much better understanding what they are going through, and what they are thinking. You must go where they go. And be mindful that this is not the same for every business. You may find a great audience for your business on Twitter while someone else may find that LinkedIn is their ideal social network hangout.

3. What does tomorrow hold

As a business owner and someone who knows their product and potential market you must do more than just create something your target audience wants today you must create what they will need in the future. You must identify how your market will evolve and do more than just provide a feature set or product that meets their needs today. You have to anticipate what the future holds. Henry Ford has been credited with saying something along these lines:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
More details via HBR

The veracity of the quote aside, the sentiment is true. Often your target audience is unaware of what they will desire in 6 months, 12 months, the future. Your job is to find your target, identify their future desires, and market towards this goal. Obviously this is a challenging task. While you cannot predict the future you should be consistently innovating and pushing the boundaries in anticipation for what will be required in the future.

4. How big is your audience

One of the most important questions you should ask as you seek out your target audience should be how big the potential market is. If you incorrectly identify your audience, if you overestimate the potential you will find your business is producing more than the demand and you’ll fail to be successful. You should look to well-known and respected sources regarding the potential market. As a business owner or marketer you are undoubtedly optimistic. You believe your product is needed by everyone everywhere. This is not the truth. Remember, you can’t be too cautious about believing your own stories. Do the digging, look at the cold hard facts. There are numerous reports and surveys carried out on most potential markets. Some of these reports may require you to purchase them. Do so. It cannot be stressed enough that you understand the true size of your potential market. Failure to accurately identify this metric will leave you standing in an empty room, alone, with an amazing but unneeded product.

5. How big is the room

In addition to the audience but somewhat related, you should also do digging into the size of the room. This means looking beyond the existing audience but the empty space where your audience may expand. This point ties the previous two points nicely together. You need to seek out what the future for your target looks like as well as how big that audience currently is. Then once you have this two metrics you can massage them to forecast the potential future market and ultimately the size of the “room”. In this case you’re looking at the negative space. Where will your product be able to expand and grow and add market share. Within different verticals where are the walls (or ceilings) what are the limiting factors for your audience? Don’t fall into the trap of believing your target is too perfect and beyond the constraints of any room – every business, every product has limitations and boundaries. Identify these early.

6. What does your competition see

If you are in a market where your competitors existed first you have a distinct advantage. Dig into their marketing strategy, their keyword targeting, their landing pages and their email marketing campaigns. Don’t blindly attempt to reinvent the wheel. Look around and see what’s been done already. You can gain an infinite amount of wisdom by learning from the mistakes of others. Just because you are doing something different, something revolutionary, or something never seen before does not mean there is no value in what others have done previously. Learn from what your competitors see. What have they identified as the potential target audience or what leads have the most potential. This is smart marketing. This is smart lead generation. Use the countless hours of others to better find and market to your target audience.

7. Plan smart marketing

This step is listed last because you should complete the first 6 steps first. While you should put a first priority on finding and relating with your target audience this last step is quite important. Once you have found your target audience you need to create a plan to market to them. This smart marketing involves how you create your marketing landing pages, the format and structure of your email marketing campaigns, and the keywords you should focus on when crafting your content marketing strategy. When you know your target audience you will be fully equipped to prepare a marketing plan that meets your potential leads where they live. Mautic has a powerful marketing automation platform capable of organizing multiple campaigns based on your target audience, but perhaps an even greater feature exists. Mautic allows you to test landing pages, keyword strategies, form conversions, and as a result better identify your potential leads. You should be marketing smarter. Mautic helps.

The act of finding and marketing to your target audience is a fundamental building block for a successful business. Following the above 7 steps will help you to have a clear picture regarding your potential audience. Clarity on this aspect of your business will give you unmatched opportunity for growth. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to make informed decisions on future strategies, advanced marketing opportunities, and more. You’ll make the most of your marketing dollars and you’ll be fully equipped for growth and success.