Everything gets easier when you walk away from the hubris of everyone. Your work is not for everyone.
Mass marketing is OVER. We are all segments of one because our view of the world is created by what we click on. Foodies will see recipes. Musicians will see ads for instruments. Your B2B buyers will see all your competitors’ claims. As Seth Godin says, “It’s very easy for us to think we live in this mass-market world, but we don’t. We live in a micro-market world.
In our micro-market world, your job is NOT to out-claim the competition. No outlandish stats here. We’ve all heard about the Volkswagen emissions fiasco – and they’ve paid out $15 billion for those claims. Your job is to be smart and learn about your buyers’ needs in detail. Then, go above and beyond those needs. Delight, entertain and educate your buyers. It all starts with segmentation.
Segmentation is a natural result of the vast differences among people. Use it to your advantage. Find groups with similar needs. Find key decision makers and solve their problems. With ABM, you’re always hunting for the low-hanging fruit, concentrating sales and marketing attention on a smaller set of high-value accounts.
But how can you “create an audience of one” and market to a committee of different buyers at the same time? That’s where ABM is most effective. When you know your buyers this well, you can anticipate their needs and serve up the right content in marketing. We call this needs-based segmentation because it’s focused on buyer needs, not your product or service.
Ultimately, if you have a good marketing automation platform, you can segment based on almost anything. Needs-based segmentation makes it possible to tailor effective messages and value propositions to multiple buyers at each stage.