Divide and Conquer: A Quick Guide to Website Segmentation Strategy

This quick how-to guide will help you connect each of your customers to content specific to their individual needs faster and more effectively.

Is your website’s content delivering unique, targeted information to each of your targeted customer segments? If you’re not embracing website segmentation, you’re missing an opportunity to better engage and direct web visitors, and differentiate your brand from its competitors.
So, you’ve built a great website for your B2B technology company. You’ve embraced great design principles, published helpful and high-quality content, and optimized the site for inbound marketing and search engine indexing.
You should be all set, right? Maybe not.
The truth is that the sophisticated design techniques of a few years ago are now commonplace, and businesses must do more to make their websites stand out from the crowd.
One of the best ways to do that is to segment your website’s design and content.
In essence, website segmentation delivers unique, targeted content that speaks to specific customer or industry segments’ needs and pain points, and does so in the clearest, most concise, and most interesting manner.
As Lattice Engines content marketing manager Amanda Maksymiw writes for The Content Marketing Institute, website segmentation is all about providing an experience that allows visitors to self-select themselves into product or industry-specific subpages. And when they get to those pages, they’re met by content — videos, blog posts, case studies, etc. — that is highly relevant to their needs, not another buyer’s.

What You Need to Know First

Before you begin overhauling your website to accommodate your various customer segments, it’s critical to do a little bit of homework to make sure that you’re ready to deliver content that will speak to their specific needs.
For instance, as Vince Giorgi writes for Hanley Wood Marketing, have you determined which personas or markets will make up each of your segments, and what each of those segments cares about? And what about the unique challenges of those segments? Can you speak with enough authority about them, and have you produced enough content to address those challenges on a separate website subpage?
Ultimately, you need to answer three questions before you begin segmenting your content:

• Who is your audience and which product or service best aligns with their needs?
• What topics are they looking for your input on and what problems or issues can your website help them solve?
• What is the most valuable information you can provide them?

It might be useful to create buyer personas for each of your segments, as well. At the end of the day, there’s a big difference between presenting information to a CFO and a CMO, even if they both work for a company that resides in the same segment.

5 Website Segmentation Best Practices

When done well, website segmentation can increase website visitor engagement, differentiate your brand from its competitors, and improve inbound marketing effectiveness by prompting visitors to explore beyond the home page.
Here are five website segmentation best practices that will ensure your segmentation strategy fulfills its promise to deliver clear, concise, and relevant content to target visitor groups:

1. Use visual and interactive cues to prompt self-selection: You want your website visitors to feel like they’re in control of their experience. By using cues, you can encourage visitors to self-select into specific segments based on their industry, problem, or role, and control their experience by providing information that is most useful or engaging for them.
2. Speak directly to each target audience’s needs: Once visitors have self-selected themselves into a specific segment, make sure they’re greeted by content that is relevant to their interests and resonates with their needs. Whether that means sharing how-to videos and blog posts, or pointing to specific product spec sheets, the idea is to make visitors feel like the website was built uniquely for their challenges.
3. Keep segment-specific pages clean, simple, and easy to navigate: Providing too much information, cluttering your page design, and making navigation difficult are all pitfalls that will overwhelm potential customers and cost you visitor engagement. Take care to ensure that your website is neither too bare nor too heavily laden with unnecessary technical details. The key is to provide simple value propositions that speak clearly to the needs of that segment.
4. Diversify and tailor your segmented content: Some content types resonate more with certain buyers than others, so be sure to offer a variety of content formats — bylined articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, case studies, etc. — on each segmented page. Exactly which types of formats you use will depend on your business and industry, but including at least two or three different types of content is a good rule of thumb.
5. Provide segment-focused interactive content: This will show your website visitors your degree of specialization, knowledge, and experience in their market, and increase visitor engagement. For instance, if a specific customer segment aligns with one particular product offering, you might provide an ROI calculator or an interactive video walk-through of its best features.

The basic idea with these best practices is to give visitors an easier way to find exactly what they want as soon as they get to your site. And once you redirect them to a subpage or landing page that’s tailored to their needs, it’s critical to remember that your job isn’t complete.
For each segmented section of your website, you must also consider the specific topics, content formats, and media that each persona will want to consume, and deliver that information in a clean, interactive environment.

Examples of Outstanding Website Segmentation

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Additional Resources

The ABCs of Content Segmentation by Hanley Wood Marketing
Website Content Segmentation by OpenView Labs
How to Use Content Segmentation to Differentiate Your Brand Online by The Content Marketing Institute