A modern marketer understands the need to segment prospects in a way that helps your organisation progress them through their buying cycle i.e. a lead nurturing program.

Simply buying a list and then emailing them or inviting them to an event is a bit like winking at someone in the dark, it’s reasonably ineffective. Unless of course you have budget to burn, you will eventually hit the mark.

Start with your buyer’s journey

Once you understand the process your buyers go through in order to procure your products or services, you can look at more intelligent ways of engaging them. Remember, the buyer’s journey should be broken into stages where you’re able to observe certain behaviours.

Your buyer’s journey should be written in the language of the customer, not internal ‘sales speak’ reflective of your selling process. The two should be mapped in parallel, this helps with reporting through your Marketing Automation and CRM systems.

Identify the key behaviours

Once you have your buyer’s journey mapped, you’re in a position to look at how your organisation can solve the business problems of your buyer. Collateral, communications and events should always speak to how you solve specific business problems and how you’re able to do it better than anyone else in the market.

This “IP” rests in the heads of your sales team, including pre-sales. Your customer service team will also be able to offer insight around the various levels of success a customer has had following the sale.

Prepare content to suit the key behaviours & business problems

When you prepare content for your buyers, prepare it in such a way that it talks to their business problems. There’s no need to “product dump” on them during this top of funnel lead nurturing part of your engagement.

Today’s buyer is able to self-educate about your product. They can source product features and benefits from your website or perhaps via blogs that you or your customers may host.

Your messaging needs to focus on the business problems you solve. Yes, this is more work than simply preparing glossy product brochures, but it will pay off.

Smarter Segmentation for Eloqua Customers

In the image below you can see specific rules have been created in order to arrive at a list of prospects. These are demographic or profile data points e.g. which state, their job title and their relationship to the organisation i.e. Prospect or Customer.

This level of segmentation should be a starting point. However, the fun begins when you start to look at how you can segment prospects buy their digital behaviour or digital footprint.

From the segmentation above, you’ve identified “who”. Perhaps you could call this an “Ideal Client Profile” or ICP. For Eloqua customers, you have a wide range of additional ways to look at how engaged your ideal clients are. Each of the icons below can be dragged and dropped into the segmentation tool that you see above.

You now start the process of understanding a prospect’s behaviour. When carefully connected with your content marketing and your lead scoring, you will begin to understand so much more than simply “who”. You can also prepare content for trigger-based marketing.

For example, if a prospect opens a specific number of emails within a certain period of time, you may want to engage with them via a special offer. That offer could be a face-to-face event. Instead of hitting your entire database to attend an event, why not reach out to those people who have shown specific interest through their digital behaviour/footprint?