Segments are used to capture company visits matching a defined set of filters so you can monitor new leads, existing prospects and track marketing programs.
Put differently, Segments are buckets to group leads based on customisable parameters.
This guide will cover a range of Segments you can configure, the aim is to offer ideas and use cases that you can make your own 🎉
If you are completely new to Segments, please check out how to use filters and create your first relevant lead Segment.
Before getting started
Hopefully you also plan on implementing stages in Snitcher to qualify, manage and assign leads 👇
The “Ideal Customer Profile” segment
Purpose = automatically capture leads matching your target company profile.
Dialling the filtering in on this segment takes time. Too loose and there are excess bad fit leads to disqualify, too tight and good leads are filtered out. We like to start with relatively loose filters and tighten them over time to find the right balance.
It’s best to include some of the following filters.
1️⃣ Company or visitor locations - there are options ranging from countries right down to a postcode.
2️⃣ Company industries - keep in mind when filtering for target companies in e.g. the Financial Services sector to include overlapping industries such as Accounting and Banking. You can always remove industries if you are repeatedly disqualifying leads.
3️⃣ Company size - add in a little wiggle room when inputting employee count. For instance if you target companies between 200-500 people, select 50-1000 at first.
💡 If your ICP is simpler e.g. companies in the US with less than 500 employees. There’s no need to complicate things by using additional filters. We often find starting with simple filters is a better option while figuring out what works for you.
4️⃣ Tags - add filters to remove leads with Qualified and Unqualified tags if you are using the tags to qualify.
5️⃣ Behavior - What is the minimum level of engagement that defines a lead for your team? For instance 15 seconds + or more than 2 page views will remove bounce visits.
💡 As you add in each filter, hit apply to double check the logic of the segment is working.
For notifications on new leads or to receive segment reports, check out the articles below.
The “Qualified Lead’’ segment
Purpose = qualified leads, need we say more?
Having all of your qualified leads in one segment (bucket) is particularly useful. Leads can be worked and tracked within the tool or distributed to your sales team through exports and integrations.
Sales Managers and Marketing can keep an eye on the segment with some of the following in mind.
1️⃣ Are the number of qualified leads declining or growing over time?
2️⃣ Is the quality remaining constant?
3️⃣ How does this compare to pipeline conversion rates (us a lagging indicator here)?
4️⃣ If reps are qualifying their own leads - does this match your definition?
💡 Use the segment for re-targeting on LinkedIn or other platforms. Plus analyse the segment for as common sources or pages views so you can improve subsequent campaigns and content generation strategies.
💡 Both teams can use this list as a point of alignment to stay on the same page regarding what good leads look like.
The “Unqualified’’ segment
"It’s just as valuable knowing what not to do".
Reviewing unqualified leads will help you find poorly performing paid activities or content. If the same sources don't generate target traffic, you can save budget.
Trends might emerge as you find new verticals regularly visiting and engaging with the website, neither sales nor marketing targets which could make for good customers.
The Sales Rep’s Segments
Give your reps the power to monitor their own leads, along with notifications when prospects visit the website again and overview reports on their leads activities.
Let’s shift our attention to marketing segments
Marketing can be a tough gig, part science, art and expense justification.
Segments provide a window to view paid or organic efforts from a quality perspective. Offering an an early indication on what’s working, without needing to wait for conversions to roll in. Enabling you to make the most of your budget spend and the leads you generate.
There are endless options when it comes to using segments for marketing. You can find a few we like to use that will hopefully give you an idea of the possibilities and the inspiration to start mixing and matching.
The ICP (relevant) leads segment
👉 Analysing target traffic, re-targeting and aligning with sales
The good news is the segment created for sales serves a double purpose and teams will need to be in agreement on what constitutes a relevant lead 🎉
The better news, the “ICP Segment” segment can be used as a basic building block for almost anything.
Here are a few marketing applications:
1️⃣ Re-target qualified leads
2️⃣ Create a lead funnel e.g. All companies identified ▶ potential leads ▶ qualified leads
3️⃣ Analyse visit sources of relevant leads (campaigns, channels, referrals, ads)
4️⃣ Analyse the most and least engaged content by relevant leads
5️⃣ Analyse exit or bounce pages
By regularly checking conversion rates between each stage, you gain a strong understanding of marketing performance in attracting target companies.
Target company engagement segments
👉 Target visitor journey analysis and optimization
Using ICP filters combined with increasing engagement offers the ability to understand target companies through the buyer's journey.
We recommend 3 - 7 Segments with increasing engagement. The conversion rates between each segment will show at which point your target audience is dropping off.
💡 Pro tip: To take this to the next level,, look for common exit points and sources to determine what is causing the largest drop off.
1️⃣ Does most of the target audience exit between stage 2 and 3 e.g. after
2️⃣ Are there specific visit sources that perform better or worse at driving engagement?
3️⃣ Are there pieces of content or pages that can be optimized to increase engagement?
💡 If you have a defined buyer's journey in place look for ICP companies taking unexpected journeys through poorly optimized pages of the website, making for an easy quick win.
Solving or improving the conversion rates between stages of the funnel or journey will give lead to large efficiencies in return on budget. We recommend starting with the largest point of drop off and optimising from there.
For retargeting, create ad audiences using the same behaviour metrics and our company data in Google Analytics or send the Segments to Audiences in LinkedIn.
Lastly, if you would like to build dashboards and visualise the information, connect Google Analytics and use our Looker Studio Templates.
Campaign, channel and ad tracking segments
👉 Allocate budget to the best performing paid marketing activities while reducing expenditure on poorly performing initiatives.
There’s a couple options here depending on what you would like to see.
✔ Track all the identified companies from a campaign.
✔ Track target companies from a campaign or channel e.g. Google
✔ Track a subset of your target audience if the purpose was to just target one industry.
✔ Track a select list of companies/accounts if ABM is the name of the game.
The same concept can be applied to advertising channels, referral sources and individual ads.
While segments are a good measure of the performance of your campaigns. If you would like to do an in-depth analysis and visualise the results, we recommend using our Looker Studio Templates.
It’s also possible to use the connection to re-target good fit companies. Mix in behavioural metrics depending on how you wish to segment you target audience when serving intent-based ads.
Content segments
👉 Create more content that engages your target audience
Much the same as campaign segments, by tracking specific pages or content clusters it’s possible to gain a deeper understanding of the type of companies engaging with your content and by extension the performance of your SEO strategy.
☑ What percentage of your content is driving target company engagement
☑ Merge and purge poorly performing content
☑ Produce more content that actually attracts your target audience
☑ Optimise content for conversion that drives the most engagement
☑ Compare the value of backlinks
☑ Optimize internal linking structure for target company engagement
In conclusion
There is no one size fits all solution to Segments and finding the optimal mix will evolve as your understanding of what's possible with the data expands.
Regularly discussing what you would like to filter for and examine from a traffic quality perspective will lead to new ideas and combinations of the examples above.
If you have ideas or need some help, please drop us a message💪