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Effective Customer Segmentation In The B2B Arena

Despite what you may have heard, effective marketing in the B2B arena requires similar skills and tactics as B2C. You’ll need to build rapport with your target market, sell a product that fits neatly within their needs, and a brand identity that sets you apart as a suitable trading partner. Here, we’ll cover one of the all-important aspects of any modern marketing campaign: segmenting your target audience.



Think About Size


The kind of offers you bring to the table, the kind of deals you make, and the scale of the projects you take on, will all dictate the size of the B2B body you should be targeting as a client. In order to communicate with these clients with messages that really resonate with them, use their size as a method of segmenting them. Some businesses, like The Temporary Fencing Shop for example, have an exceptionally wide range of clients to target in terms of size. Businesses that deal with a narrower niche, on the other hand, will naturally be more limited. With a handful of exceptions though, businesses that are of a similar size generally have similar approaches to the volume of products they acquire, the lifecycle their assets go through, and even some parts of the procurement process. If you can form offers and packages that are suited to certain company sizes, a large part of your marketing will take care of itself.


Segment According to Niches


If many businesses in your target market are tied to specific niches and market segments, then this is something you should certainly be exploiting. Make a point of showing how well you understand their business through selling your products as something that’s integral to a certain aspect of their business model. The way private consumers use products and services is relatively simple. In the B2B arena, however, your sales can depend heavily on fitting your product or service in with a complex chain of processes that go on at your customers’ businesses. You may think that narrowing your appeal like this for each kind of buyer is too much work to be worth it. However, when you consider that the B2B arena has fewer, and larger buyer entities than any B2C market, it’s easy to see the need for this kind of segmentation.


Think of Relationships Like Currency


Selling any kind of goods or services in the B2C market can depend heavily on emphasising the benefits of all the features that go into them. When it comes to the B2B market, however, generating sales can depend majorly on how well you connect to the other decision makers at a given business. You might have the perfect product for a given business’s workflow. However, if a competitor manages to build a closer relationship with the executives, even if they provide a lesser product or service, they might be the one who prevails. Making relationships a priority, and taking different approaches for different execs you’re in contact with, can make segmentation so much more helpful.

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