You’re most likely aware of how important it is to provide valuable information to any leads you’re attempting to establish a relationship with. Whether it’s through emails, blogs, or advertising, the better you’re understanding of the leads you’re targeting, the more specific your messaging will be. This is where understanding how to segment leads comes into play.
The best way to get your leads to convert is to address their needs and let them know how you’ll solve their specific problems, setting your business apart from your competitors.
Now that you understand why lead segmentation is crucial, it’s time to talk about how to segment your leads.
How to Segment Leads
What is Lead Segmentation?
In order to understand how to segment your leads, you need to know what lead segmentation is. It’s when a business separates its customers into different groups based on traits, factors, or behaviors they have in common.
In order to do this, you’ll need to start by targeting your audience based on their needs. This is how you can make sure that they’ll become leads and from here you can begin creating segmented lists. Once you’ve done this you can target every new lead with messages tailored to them that will encourage them to move on to the next stage of the sales funnel until they complete a purchase.
Establish Your Goals
You’ll also need to determine what goals you’re trying to accomplish through your segmentation strategy so you can ensure that the segments you develop will help you achieve these goals.
You should also keep in mind that your business has a unique offering for your customers, so your goals need to reflect that. They need to be specific to your business, so thinking about your business’s features and needs will be a great place to start developing your segmentation strategy.
When you have all this figured out, you can move on to deciding how you’ll segment your leads.
Segmenting Your Leads
After pinpointing your audience’s specific needs, you’ll know exactly what kind of messages and content they’re looking for from your business. If you don’t stop to figure that out before you begin segmenting your leads, your lists will probably be too generic and you’ll end up losing leads between each stage of the sales funnel.
You should also develop segment lists based on each stage of the buying process because your leads’ needs and expectations will change as they move through different buying stages. Setting up your marketing automation so that leads are moved into different lists based on actions corresponding to specific stages will be the most efficient way to do this.
Segmenting Based on Characteristics & Behaviors
In addition to making sure that customers move through lists based on the buying process, you can also use the characteristic and behavioral attributes of your leads to segment them.
Characteristic segments can be geographic, demographic, sociographic, psychographic, professional, and corporate. Behavioral segments refer to segments made based on a lead’s actions when they visit your website. These include page visits, regular visitors, referral source, email signups, keywords, purchases, number of purchases, and more.
Having a CRM in place will help you efficiently measure and track these actions for each lead.
Once you’ve determined your goals and which attributes you want to use to segment your leads, make sure to check in with other departments in your business, such as sales, so you can make sure all departments are on the same page and can make the most of using your segmented lists to target leads.
Lead Scoring
After all this, the next step is implementing lead scoring. In order to make sure that you have the best quality leads, assign a lead score to different behaviors. You can make this process easier by placing each action that would fall under behavioral segmentation at a relevant stage of the buying process, so you’ll know whether the action will make them more or less likely to make a purchase.
Analyze Your Segmentation
As with everything you do in marketing, even once you’ve decided how you’ll segment your leads, you need to analyze your strategy to understand whether your strategy is still working for your business or if changes need to be made.
Once again, get input from marketing, sales, and service teams to find out if they feel that any segment changes are needed. You can also work with these departments to come up with experimental segmentation groups so you can determine if these might work better.
You should also review your segmentation strategy whenever your business updates your product(s) or service(s), rebrands, or revises its buyer personas. Any changes in these areas may affect your lead segments, so analyzing your strategy is important.
Implementing a CRM
If it sounds like manually managing all of these strategies would be difficult, impossible, or at least highly inefficient, it’s because it is. Making use of automation with the help of a CRM such as HubSpot or SharpSpring is the solution to managing these strategies in a way that will maximize your lead segmentation strategy.
Another benefit of a CRM is that you can create profiles for each of your leads, updating their info as they move through each stage of the buying process. Keeping track of this data will provide you with more information about your leads so you can better tailor your emails, content, and more.
Both HubSpot and SharpSpring also have email marketing software included, and email is a huge part of reaching your segmented leads. Having your email integrated with your CRM also makes things easier by having all the information you need in one place.
Having the ability to make great-looking forms will also play a large role in helping you segment your leads by allowing you to capture information about them, especially email addresses. Quality forms that also ask the right questions of the people filling them out will also provide you with better information about your leads, adding to your ability to tailor your messages for them and provide value.
Fortunately, HubSpot and SharpSpring both provide users with the ability to create forms along with everything else the platforms provide. As with email, this centralizes everything you’ll need for a great lead segmentation strategy, allowing you to work efficiently.
RESULTS ARE VITAL
Using all these tips to segment your leads will both increase the quality of your leads and allow you to provide them greater value through emails and content tailored to their needs. This way, you’ll be able to better influence your leads to convert.
If you need help developing a lead segmentation strategy and automating it with a CRM like SharpSpring or HubSpot, Vital Digital is here to help!
We provide digital marketing services including, but not limited to content marketing, search engine optimization, and website development. We also provide HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier consulting to ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible. Request a free quote and let us know how we can help!