Most people define audience segmentation as an approach to identify micro communities on social media in order to tailor creative campaigns to each one.

In this video, I talk about using audience segmentation to plan for campaigns and programs. Enjoy the video below and subscribe to my Youtube channel to be the notified when new videos are added.

Ok, so you have a product that you want to sell to IT decision makers.

Maybe it’s a data or cloud platform, enterprise security software, ERP, RPA (Robotics Process Automation” or Unified Communications.

And let’s assume you are planning for a full scale omnichannel marketing program complete with media relations, social media marketing, influencer marketing, demand generation, search engine marketing and display advertising. You even have a plan to activate employees as brand storytellers.

You’ve gone through rounds and rounds of edits to your messaging, creative, landing pages and KPIs.

You have everything documented. The entire C-suite is bought into your vision. Your advertising and comms agencies are ready to go. Everyone is excited.

And then you launch.

A day later, you scratch head and wonder why the campaign isn’t performing the way you expected.

Maybe it’s the agency. Let’s blame them. The targeting is off. The ads are wrong. The website broke.

But the question I have for you is … do you really know who your audience is? And if so, did you spend time with audience and campaign segmentation in order to be as laser focused as possible.

Look the reality is that all IT professionals have one thing in common. They work in IT.

But outside of that, there are hundreds of variables and characteristics that make them unique.

Now Google is your friend but it’s only going to give you limited information. Now I am pretty good at using Google (yes, I use boolean) and I found some good nuggets that you might be able to use:

• Innovation is one reason why IT decision makers seek new platforms
• IT looks to influencers to validate purchase
• They consume content

Ok, now moving down to the Slideshare presentation.

The only thing I found really useful – other than damn — 15% of ITDMs say that sales cycle takes longer 12 months.

But here is another interesting statistic on what we just saw about content. We can see that download consumption varies by the topic or technology.

I am familiar with this study from Adobe because I have referenced it before.

The study examined IT decision makers’ top concerns for 2020.

• Data security was a top concern
• AI Implementation
• Creating a better customer experience using Machine Learning
• Driving innovation

And I also found this to be interesting as well – what factors influence purchase decisions.

• Faster integration
• AI powered technology

So I want to now introduce a new concept called multi-segment audience intelligence.

And the process involves dissecting and clustering sub audiences – analyzing each of their sharing habits, conversational patterns, demographics and psychographics in order to get actionable and defendable insights that you can use to make data-informed decisions.

So for the purposes of this blog post I did a quick audience segmentation example analysis of IT decision makers and the cluster analysis shows each of these sub-audiences and how they are connected.

Because I work with a lot of B2B and technology companies, I can tell you that each of these IT audiences are very different – not just in terms of job titles or functions, but also their interests.

The C-suite or a developer audience would require a complete separate analysis, because you’d find very different interests and characteristics. Moving on to what I call an audience matrix. The top row represents each of the audiences we just looked at.

In the columns, I added a few variables that I like to use:

1. Which brands do they follow and talk about. What’s the context of that conversation.
2. What topics are they talking more or less about over time.
3. What’s top of mind for them right now, today.
4. What software language do they use to develop code (obviously this isn’t applicable to each audience)
5. What media publications are they reading when it comes to specific topics. In other words, when reading about business, are they reading the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Business Insider or all three.
6. Maybe for security-related topics, they prefer ZDNet and Dark Reading.
7. And then perhaps for content related to AI and data, it’s the Enterprisers Project.
8. And lastly, what hashtags do they use in social media.

Now I don’t have time to do a full analysis and fill this matrix in, but if I were planning a campaign, I would go through this exercise and share it with my internal stakeholders. This approach to campaign segmentation is one of those B2B technology trends that marketers must pay attention to.

You’d be surprised at how different each one of these audiences are from one another which is why audience segmentation is so important for all campaigns. Sparktoro is an audience insights tool that can help start the campaign segmentation process.