John WattonWhile we all hear that we should segment our marketing efforts, John Watton, director of marketing of behavioural marketing automation company Silverpop in Europe, wants us to go above and beyond. At the B2B Marketing Forum on 14 March his talk has the interesting title: The end of segmentation in B2B. Should we be worried?

“Our mass marketing approach days are over. We need to have a more tailored and relevant conversation with buyers, whether they’re customers or prospects. When segmenting we are happy for a good rate, but there is still a long way to go. If you have a Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of 3%, why haven’t you reached the other 97%?”

When evolving our marketing, we need to move towards ‘campaigns of one’ where you really look at the individual. It’s not new but finally the technology is there to really support this method of marketing.

Let’s build further on a buyer persona

John Watton: “Let’s build out collateral and keep having our conversations. The consumer is more demanding, more savvy. We all use smart phones, social media and so on. That savvy consumer wants a relevant offer. He wants a relevant conversation. How they react around your collateral tells you a lot about the phase of the buying process they’re in but also how best to approach them. So, by not only using facts like geographic locations, age, gender and sorts you fill your profile but also by monitoring individual behaviour.”

But how do we do this? “The good news is, that this is not some sort of radical-rip-everything-open-and-start-again solution. Everyone is probably doing something already in this field.”

So how do you get started and hit the ground running?

  1. Get a good technology platform to help you because you can’t keep monitoring thousands of accounts by just using excel sheets. It also should not cost you a fortune.
  2. Use web analytics to understand customer behaviour
  3. Understand who your customer is and why he does things.

Want to meet John Watton? He will speak at the B2B Marketing Forum in Amsterdam on March 14th.