Growth Market Confidential: Data Matched to Segmentation Insight Will Beat the Competition

Aggressive tech marketers know they could drive faster growth through more effective segment marketing, if they just had a critical mass of decent data for the segment.

New market segment opportunity

The gospel of Crossing the Chasm, Marketing High Technology and most successful tech marketers is that great tech companies are built by sequentially dominating market segments. While that makes sense at a strategic level, it is hard to assemble the tactical pieces to make it happen. Below are the types of segment opportunities we talk about with enterprise tech marketers.

• A feature release has put a company in a strong position relative to a financial services industry compliance requirement. The company has written 3 white papers on the issue and recruited industry-specific VARs in London, New York and Frankfurt.  They are ready to act, provided they can reach the segment.
• A competitor has run into problems with a high profile security issue and has not kept up with the latest code platforms. Our customer has a thoughtful “assessment white paper” which should hit the mark with the installed base of the competitor.
• A company in a new, fast growing space is the first to set up regional sales, support and localized product in France and Eastern Europe. They make the effort to localize content that they’ve proven can move the early adopters in the market.

Data obstacles to winning market advantage

Even with crucial pieces in place, tech companies still struggle to make fast enough progress in their target segments. And in tech marketing; speed kills in both directions.  One challenge is not having enough recent intent data to fuel effective online and BDR campaigns.

• Reps will make efforts to call into the new segment, but when they call contacts that are not active in the technology, their progress will be spotty, the word gets out among the team and they will shift their time to “safer” paths to their quota.
• Marketers will try to earn inbound prospect flow with good web content as a long term strategy. But, the reality is that new content will not earn any decent SEO position for 6 months, with prospect flow coming in slowly after that. That 6-9 month delay will hurt any push into a new segment.
• Because the existing marketing database was earned from a different content and segment focus, the list has low open rates for their newer segment effort..

To make fast progress in a new segment, tech companies need a different kind of data-enabled approach.  First, they need a prospect list that 1) fits the new target segment’s firmographic profile (company size, industry), and 2) even more importantly, this list must be populated by contacts that are proven to “have the pain” aligned to the technology. If the prospect list has both characteristics, marketing and sales have a much better chance of success.

Now our strategically-minded, segment-oriented customers are using the activity-based insight in TechTarget’s Priority Engine to penetrate target segments faster and launch sub-segment marketing experiments with minimal effort.  Priority Engine provides them the ability to mine the largest pool of truly active enterprise technology buyers to:

• Identify accounts that match a target segment’s firmographic and geographic description,
• Download the active prospects with full contact details within these accounts based on their relevant actions on specific technology issues, within the last 90 days
• Refresh that list with newly active prospects every week to feed the effort on an on-going basis.

Targeting propels faster growth

This level of targeting helps marketers propel faster segment growth because their emails earn better conversion and BDR calling campaigns see higher engagement rates. Prospects respond better because they fit both the firmographic and pain point targets of the segment.  Marketers can use this flow of “in-segment” data for tactics such as:

• Fuel a new nurture stream for financial services ITDMs dealing with the latest compliance issue.
• Publish a weekly-refreshed call list of prospects showing interest in Storage AND DevOps in a geo..
• Give a sales team the most active accounts on their technology area in 5 European countries.
• Send 2 emails a week to prospects that have read about a competitor over the last 90 days.

These types of tactics are helping data-centric marketing teams take a leadership position through much faster segment progress. If you’d like to talk more about data and your segment marketing goals, please email me here.