Segmentation (Glossary Definition)

Segmentation is all about understanding exactly who you're trying to communicate with and where that person is in their buyer’s journey.

In other words, when we say who that person is, we’re referring to their buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal client based on research and educated speculation.

Buyer Personas and the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer's journey is the active research process someone goes through in between when a person first starts expressing symptoms of a problem, challenge, struggle, or desire to achieve a particular goal -- and when that person becomes a customer.

When you put those two factors together, the intersection of the buyer persona and the buyer’s journey, you get a very effective strategy for segmenting someone.

Importance of Segmentation

Why is segmentation so important? In a digital-first world, the modern buyer isn’t just looking at your company, your website, your digital presence, and your social media. Chances are, the person that you want to sell to purchases from Amazon Prime, uses Uber or Lyft to get around, they use iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu. And guess what? They expect your business to be almost as good as those other companies that they use in their personal lives.  

They don't expect you to get the artificial intelligence and the machine learning quite as good. But if you try to use a one-size-fits-all or one-size-fits-most approach as if it was ten years ago -- when internet marketing, digital marketing, and content marketing we’re all in their infancy -- that's not what your clients or prospects want.

In order to be able to effectively reach them with a message that resonates based on who they are and where they are, your segmentation strategy is extremely important.

The Bottom Line

Chances are if strangers are not listening to your company and not reading your messages, if your website visitors, leads, sales opportunities, or clients are not engaged or if you're having any kind of engagement problems at all with getting people to open, read, click, and convert on your messages, this can typically be traced back to a failure to get the segmentation right.

If you want to be able to compete effectively with attracting the right strangers, converting those visitors into leads, closing those leads into clients, and delighting those clients into promoters, it’s absolutely critical that you nail your segmentation.   

Does your company use segmentation to communicate with your clients and prospects? Share your thoughts in the section for comments below.

To learn more about segmentation, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.