Guest Blogger – Megan Cramer

Targeted marketing is crucial in today’s business world, and so many factors are at play when you undertake this task. Identifying your ideal client persona, developing a list of qualified leads, creating content that will entice and appeal to your leads… the list goes on. However, in order to launch a targeted MSP marketing campaign in the first place, you need to be able to easily sift through your list of contacts to find your targets. This is why lead segmentation is so important.

Imagine that you have a list of contacts that you’ve compiled using various methods. Some, you may have met at trade shows. Others, you may have been alerted to by a referral partner. And, let’s be honest, you may have a handful (or more) for which you can’t even begin to pinpoint a source. What can you do to bring clarity to this amalgam?

You have a few options here, and which one you choose will be dependent on factors such as your time and resources available.

Step 1: Qualify Your Contacts
If you have the time (or are able to delegate the task to a team member), you can dig into the viability of each contact in your list. A simple perusal of the company website found in the contact’s email address can indicate if the company is still in existence, if they are in the area you serve, if they are in the in an industry you target, etc. You may even be able to find a staff directory in the “About Us” section of the website, which could indicate if the contact is still with that company. If that’s not the case, you can move on to searching for the contact on LinkedIn, or simply picking up the phone to attempt to reach them and determine if this is a truly qualified contact.

Through these efforts, you’ll gather a wealth of information that can ultimately be used to segment your leads. Once you’ve documented company and contact attributes such as industry, area, and contact title you can begin to build lists that target a very certain type of contact. It’s only then that you can make use of the collateral you’ve crafted specifically for this special group.

Step 2: Segment Your Leads
Your CRM and/or your MSP Marketing Automation software gives you the ability to build lists based on many different attributes of the contact. If your team has been diligent about CRM record maintenance, you should be able to pull lists based on completed fields such as industry. If that isn’t the case, but you do have access to an automation system that can build lists from attributes such as the contents of an email address (a feature within the Mindmatrix Portal), you can still pinpoint contacts that you’re after.

Remember, qualification is just as important as having well-defined lists, and the most reliable way to do this is by picking up the phone. Now that your lists are in place you are ready to launch a targeted campaign and start the sales process!

Ideas for targeted lists:

• Tradeshow attendees
• Partner referrals
• Specific industries
• Interest shown in a particular product or service

Megan Cramer is a MSP Marketing and Sales Enablement Consultant at Mindmatrix, providing strategic consultation on marketing and sales best practices, assisting with technical needs, and interfacing with leaders in our organization to help develop new processes and program additions to best serve our clients.