Overview
Setting up segmentations in Marketo Engage is essential to ensure your business’s success by knowing and understanding your targeted audience. Having audience segmentations will allow marketers to create a more personalized message for the audience, which will then build customer loyalty and bring in valuable leads.
What is Segmentation?
Segmentation is a feature in Marketo Engage that allows users to categorize the audience into different subgroups (called segments) based on defined criteria established in a smart list for reporting and dynamic content. Marketo Segmentations are essentially permanent smart lists of your defined target audience.
Some of the most commonly used segmentations are demographics, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic, but you are not limited to just those. Your product or service will determine which audience segmentations will make the most sense for your business strategy.
Why should companies implement segmentation?
Having segmentations in place is necessary to create a personalized and tailored message for your targeted audience, which can lead to stronger connections when delivered. Creating and delivering content takes time and money, so you must have the right message and value for the right audience at the right time. Research has proved this: 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better – MarTech Today and 88% of U.S. marketers reporting seeing measurable improvements due to personalization – Evergage
Audience segmentation will allow you to:
- Define who your target audience will be
- Create more substantial marketing content that will relate to your audience
- Become more efficient by not having to recreate typical audiences
- Support Dynamic Content in Marketo
- Report on effectiveness of targeted campaigns
How to implement Segmentation
Since segmentation changes always include the entire database, creating segments based on your most common use case target audience is recommended.
One of the most common use audience segments that will most likely be used in every email you send out will be Marketable leads segmentation. You want to make sure you are sending emails to consumers who are Marketable leads and not just everyone in your database.
A more advanced segmentation approach will be Nurture Qualification Management for intelligent lead nurturing. Nurture Qualification Management is an operational program that manages the target audience for each Engagement program and adds, moves, and removes records into those Engagement Programs. Marketing Operations will create the programs in the Marketo Engage instance to make it easier to adjust the target criteria by using any data points available in Marketo Engage for each Engagement Program without the risk of a user receiving a piece of previously consumed content, whether in the corresponding Engagement Program or through some other channel. In short, the program’s overall goal is to ensure prospects and customers receive the correct messaging at the appropriate time increments.
Conclusion
Defining your audience using Segmentation is an essential business strategy in growing your audience by creating a more personal experience.
