Best Strategies to Turn Data into Actionable Insights

Sitting on a huge pile of data, but don’t know what to do with it? The right use of data is important for B2B companies to develop a foolproof go-to-market plan. No company works without data, and it’s equally important to understand how to use it to launch targeted marketing campaigns and achieve sales success.

Here are our top three tactics for B2B companies to convert data into actionable analytics and practical efforts to drive revenue.

#1 Use segmented data to connect with customers at a deeper level

Segmenting customer data is an essential part of B2B sales and marketing. Customer segmentation enables you to prioritize customer outreach, reduce churn rate, and transform customer relationships. It also helps you increase customer engagement, optimize customer communications, and choose the right channels to engage with customers. Moreover, you can create a targeted promotional strategy for each customer segment and improve sales and marketing budget efficiency.

Message personalization is the number one tactic used by email marketers to increase engagement rates. Further, a whopping 99% of marketers believe customer relationships can be advanced using personalization.
Here are some commonly-used customer segmentation models:

• Behavioral
• Firmographic
• Technographic
• Psychographic
• Geographic
• Demographic

Behavioral customer segmentation

Behavioral customer segmentation is a sales and marketing strategy that focuses on segmenting customers based on their behavioral traits, including their response to, use of, attitude toward, and knowledge of a brand, promotion, service, or product.

Google Drive’s Quick Access dashboard, Gmail’s Smart Reply feature, and Amazon’s product recommendation system are good examples of the use of behavioral customer segmentation. They show how behavioral customer segmentation can be adopted to enable seamless product usage for customers, help them achieve their end goal faster, provide enhanced customer experience, and drive sales.

Personalized recommendations are responsible for close to 35% of Amazon sales. Netflix’s recommendation engine generates 80% of the watch choices of their subscribers. Further, the online streaming service saves approximately $1 billion annually because of its personalized recommendation engine.

Behavioral customer segmentation helps you:

• Use past customer behavior and purchase history to suggest product recommendations, allow quicker and easier product usage, and predict the customer’s journey
• Allocate different product prices and target customers based on their device or operating system and device data
• Know the primary product features and benefits sought by customers to evenly target or address each customer
• Understand purchase patterns of customers during rare personal, recurring personal, and universal occasions and certain days of the week to stay more relevant to customers
• Know where a customer currently stands in the buyer’s journey and their interactions or behaviors in that stage

Firmographic customer segmentation

Firmographic data reveals and quantifies key characteristics of companies based on different variables such as YoY revenue, legal status, industry, number of employees, sales cycle stage, performance, and location.

B2B companies can benefit from firmographics in many ways. For example, firmographics can enable them to know existing and potential customers more insightfully. They can also help identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities with existing customers by anticipating their current and future business needs.

Firmographic customer segmentation enables B2B sales and marketing teams to create highly tailored and targeted campaigns. It can also boost go-to-market strategy ROI, create relevant messaging, test pricing options, and discover new and more effective advertising opportunities.

Additionally, firmographic customer segmentation allows you to:

• Target customers with personalized content including blogs, newsletters, tutorials, whitepapers, webinars, or social media ads based on their industry, market, or type of clients
• Know the long-term buying potential of customers, and accordingly create sales and marketing strategies to grow alongside them
• Provide improved customer service by asking the right questions and understanding needs, pain points, and expected solutions specific to their segment
• Pick customer segments that need more attention from you or are likely to give you more business
• Find ways to improve your products or services, customize them, or release new ones for different customer segments you serve

Technographic customer segmentation

Segmenting customers based on tech stack or doing tech stack analysis can play a vital role in improving marketing results and boosting sales. Technographic data assists with improving customer retention, gaining a competitive edge, exploring new markets, building high-quality sales conversations, and hyper-targeted prospecting.

Technographic customer segmentation can be a useful resource to:

• Customize the customer journey
• Acquire new customers
• Develop targeted products
• Upsell to existing customers
• Efficiently perform ABM

Technographic, behavioral, and firmographic data can be a deadly combination if you use ABM. Leading B2B data providers like SalesIntel can easily and quickly make this combination available for you to drive ABM initiatives. With SalesIntel, you can get access to comprehensive B2B data for ABM, which includes technographic, behavioral, and firmographic data for US-based and international businesses.

Psychographic customer segmentation

Psychographic customer segmentation helps you refine your sales and marketing campaign content and offer the right products to customers based on various psychological factors. Social status, personality, values, interests, lifestyle, opinions, motivations, priorities, and attitudes are some of the psychological factors considered for psychographic customer segmentation.

Harley Davidson’s promotions focus on the thrill-seeking, carefree, and rebellious personality characteristics of men are a clear example of the use of psychographic customer segmentation. Another example is Johnnie Walker’s collaboration with HBO to come out with limited-edition whiskies ‘A Song of Fire’ and ‘A Song of Ice’ targeting Game of Thrones fans.

Psychographic customer segmentation can help you:

• Identify customer pain points and address them
• Know how customers look at your brand and products
• Produce data-driven customer profiles
• Understand customer desires and how your offerings apply to them
• Improve your brand equity and understand customer purchase behavior

Geographic customer segmentation

Geographic segmentation is a common type of customer segmentation using location to create customer groups. Other factors considered for geographic customer segmentation are population density and type, culture preference, language, and climate.

Beachwear brands focusing on locations with beaches and warmer climates and winter wear brands targeting consumers in cold locations are examples of geographic customer segmentation. Another example can be McDonald’s location-based marketing strategy combining the use of in-app advertising on Waze and geofenced OOH billboards to promote McRib’s limited return and other options.

9 out of 10 marketers confirmed that location-based marketing and advertising helped them with higher sales. Further, 94% of marketers plan to use location data in ad and marketing campaigns in the future.

Some of the key benefits of using geographic customer segmentation are:

• Increase in brand reach
• Early hold on localized markets
• Enhanced communication with local audiences
• Quick market growth in geographies with similar behaviors and traits
• Focused marketing to strategically increase customer loyalty and retention

Demographic customer segmentation

Demographic customer segmentation is a practical way of targeting customers belonging to different demographic groups. It categorizes customers based on income, ethnicity, gender, occupation, family structure, age, and other demographic factors. It helps improve sales and marketing ROI by optimizing budget, resources, and time and focusing them into targeted segments.

Compared to any TV network, YouTube reaches a higher number of people in the 18-34 American audience demographic on mobile alone. Among millennials, 79% are more inclined to purchase from brands having a customer support portal that’s mobile-responsive.

Segmenting customers based on demographic factors can help you:

• Achieve better results in new product launches
• Increase effectiveness of email campaigns
• Optimize marketing strategies
• Improve offerings with target audiences in mind
• Drive strong customer loyalty

Amazon India targeting Indian consumers with festive and culture-specific ads, especially during the promotions of the Great Indian Sale, is a great example to look at.

#2 Leverage the power of Intent data to increase trust

Intent data is a broad dataset covering the online behavior-based activity of an individual or business. It’s widely used by B2B salespeople and marketers to stay informed about the purchase intent and business needs of prospects.

Intent data helps you know when your ideal accounts are ready to buy, which prospects are actively researching your products, and what your potential customers are likely to say or do next. You can significantly increase your sales and conversion rates using intent data as it enables you to track online or digital behaviors of leads, keeping you ahead of your competitors.

One of the easiest ways to build trust and credibility in your outreach is by perfecting your timing. B2B companies can use intent data and behavioral signals of leads to reach them early, personalize outreach campaigns, create targeted ads and account lists, prioritize accounts, and support lead scoring models.
Intent data, which is more behavioral, helps you:

• Identify high-value prospects to better distribute resources, budget, and time among different customer segments
• Better predict future customer behaviors
• Measure your business health amid changes in customer behaviors
• Improve ad personalization and effectively nurture customers along the buyer’s journey

Behavioral customer data based on timing is commonly used among sales and marketing teams. One example of timing-based behavioral customer data usage is Starbucks offering unique happy hours to encourage customers to make purchases during hours when store traffic is low and the customer normally wouldn’t stop by. Then there are ride-hailing companies that target office-goers and weekday customers by offering free miles and discounts on weekends.

Other benefits of using intent data are:

• Targeted ads
• Improved ABM campaigns
• Enhanced lead scoring models
• Reduced manual marketing efforts
• Personalized online experiences

There are several powerful tools available that can help you collect intent data and turn it into a revenue-generating engine. You can also combine actionable account-level insights from intent data with quality, error-free B2B data to get better results.

The Bombora and SalesIntel partnership is one such combination that you can adopt to expedite your pipeline, identify prospects showing the highest interest in your product, and score your accounts. By leveraging Bombora’s industry-leading intent data along with SalesIntel’s 95% accurate, human-verified data, you can experience 300% marketing ROI and 4X pipeline expansion.

#3 Use visitor intelligence to reduce sales research and lag times

What if you lose a customer because your customer service rep couldn’t get to them fast enough? You would want to have intel on the missed customer, even if they decided to shop next door. Imagine a customer reaching your brick-and-mortar outlet only to find it closed. Wouldn’t you at least want to know who visited your shop?

Analytics-driven software, research-on-demand, and visitor intelligence systems can prove to be crucial to your B2B sales and marketing efforts. They will not only let you know who visited your website, but they will also help you identify target accounts, connect with key decision-makers, and create in-depth profiles.

Visitor intelligence is a great resource for go-to-market teams, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a 2020 HubSpot survey, online chats and website visits increased week over week amid the pandemic crisis. Compared to February 2020, March showed a 13% growth in average monthly website traffic.
You can use visitor intelligence data to:

• Track both anonymous and known visitors and their interaction on a granular level
• Build holistic views of the customer journey
• Segment customers flexibly and with new filters
• Improve SEO analysis and dig deep into demand and its drivers
• Create a single source of truth for individual customers

Actionable insights gathered from B2B data can help you understand target audiences and precisely know what solutions to offer, even before reaching out to them. The ‘data to insights’ conversion strategies provided above can be used individually or in combination. Test out which combination works best for you.