Remember those old Publishers Clearing House mailings? It was a big deal when they came to our house. Having an uncommon last name, we invariably got to see our name misspelled many times throughout the mail-piece. They contained wooden sentences like “Just imagine when you, [your full name], appear on the TV and in newspaper headlines in [your city] because you won our sweepstakes. Every member of the [your last name] family will celebrate winning the $10 million prize.”
We used to laugh at those corny campaigns, but the truth is that prospects now expect to be communicated with using what your organization knows about them. Don’t believe me? Answer honestly: how fast do you hit ‘delete’ when seeing an email from a retailer (even if you like them) that’s not relevant to you?! What’s a marketing group to do?
The first thing is to admit that your target audience isn’t one big homogeneous group. Do a top-to-bottom appraisal of your buyers, noting the differences among them so that you can do some good old-fashioned segmentation. For me, segmentation involves communicating a single message in the way that’s most appropriate to an identifiable audience. This post won’t go into the many copywriting tactics used to achieve ‘appropriate,’ let’s just say it’s improved since Publishers Clearing House’s time. Here we’ll focus on the amazingly new twist that the internet has brought to segmentation – it can be done remotely and, if warranted, automatically. If you’re a Salesforce user, look at apps like Postcode Anywhere and you’ll see what I mean.
Starting at the lowest level, let’s say you get a work email address from a web contact form and you need firmographic/demographic data so you can send them the appropriate follow-on email. There are some great online tools to help you flesh out their information, whether you’re looking for Company-level or individual-level data.
Company-level Data
Company-level segmentation can be done with fields like: number of employees, SIC code, annual revenue and headquarters location. Big, public companies are the easiest to get information on – they’re trackable on sites like EDGAR. Those that aren’t publically traded companies still have a lot of research sources available. Here are some websites that let you search by company name:
The Fortune 500, Business Week
The Software 500 database, for US-based software firms
GoogleNews (media coverage is often peppered with facts.)
You may have to pay to access some of these, but the information’s worth it.
Individual-level Data
If you have the persons name and contact details, you can do more segmentation by supplementing: professional designations, title/scope of responsibility, job function, years they’ve held role, gender or location (letting you derive timezone or size of city/town they live in). How do you find these fields? It’s getting easier, now that so many people are publishing their own online profiles. But even without, there are many sites that will yield great data to help your segmentation. There are social media sites that can help here too: twitter and BlogPulse are just two of them. Some sites you can search by name are:
If the organization is already your client, you can blend in even more data from your corporate records, such as: key contacts, total sales and other transactional information by which you can group them with similar clients.
In summary, it’s easy to see how these tools have made segmentation not only relevant, but an essential part of your marketing and sales arsenal. Start using this extra data and communicate smartly with your prospects, they’ll thank you for it.