Audience segmentation is the process of dividing your target audience into smaller groups based on shared characteristics. This can be done based on demographics, psychographics, behavior, or any other factor that is relevant to your business. 

In B2B lead generation, audience segmentation is essential for two reasons:

1. It allows you to target your marketing messages more effectively. When you segment your audience, you can tailor your messages to the specific needs and interests of each group. This makes your messages more relevant and persuasive, which leads to higher conversion rates. 
2. It helps you to save time and money. By targeting your marketing messages more effectively, you can save time and money on leads that are not a good fit for your business. This can lead to a significant improvement in your return on investment. 

Audience segmentation is crucial for all marketing, but especially critical for B2B lead gen

Creating Custom Audiences in Google Ads

In Google Ads, you can also use audience segmentation to create custom audiences. Custom audiences are based on your data, such as customer lists or CRM data. This allows you to target your ads to people who are already familiar with your business.

In addition, Google Ads does have two other powerful tools available that marketers can use to improve the performance of their B2B lead generation campaigns. One is Customer Match and the other is Similar Audiences. However, Google Ads will discontinue Similar Audience by August 1st, 2023. 

• Customer Match: It allows marketers to upload their customer lists to Google Ads, and then target those customers with ads on Google’s Display Network and Search Network. This is a great way to reach out to existing customers and remind them of your business, or to target new customers who are similar to your existing customers.
• Similar Audiences: It allows marketers to create custom audiences based on their existing Customer Match lists. This means that marketers can target people who are similar to their existing customers, even if those people haven’t yet interacted with their business. This can be a great way to reach new customers who are likely to be interested in your product or services.
  
  After August 1st, similar segments will be removed from all ad groups and campaigns. In place of similar segments, different campaign types will offer different solutions to help marketers leverage their first-party data, reach the right audience, and improve campaign performance so that marketers can optimize directly to their business goals.

Utilizing Google Analytics for Lead Generation

Google Ads further has the help of Google Analytics to leverage data segmentation for B2B lead generation campaigns. Here are some additional tips for using Google Analytics data for segmentation for B2B lead generation campaigns:

• Use custom dimensions and metrics: Google Analytics allows you to create custom dimensions and metrics to track the data that is most important to your business. This can help to create more meaningful segments and target your marketing messages more effectively. 
• Use audience insights: Google Analytics offers several audience insights reports that can help you to understand your audience better. These reports can provide information about your audience’s demographic, interests, and behavior.
• Use the data to create buyer personas: Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. By creating buyer personas, you can use the data from Google Analytics to understand your audience better and create marketing messages that are more likely to resonate with them. 
• Test and refine your segments: It is important to test and refine your segments over time. As you learn more about your audience, you may need to adjust your segments to ensure that they are as effective as possible. 

A/B Testing In Google Ads

A/B testing is a terrific way to identify the top-performing audience segments for B2B lead generation campaigns in Google Ads. Here are the steps on how to do it:

1. Create two or more identical ad groups, but with different audience segments.
2. Set the same budget and bidding strategy for each ad group.
3. Run the ad groups for a period of time, such as two weeks.
4. Track the performance of each ad group, such as the number of clicks, impressions, and conversions. 
5. Compare the performance of the different audience segments to identify the top performer.

It’s important to remember that marketing is not an exact science. It requires hypotheses and testing, which will give you good data that contribute to insights and strategy. This cycle leads to more efficient campaigns.

Lastly, Google Ads has an “Experiment” category where you can create a custom experiment from your original campaign and compare how your experiment performs against your original campaign over time. 

Overall, the future of audience segmentation in B2B marketing looks bright. As innovative technologies and data become more accessible, businesses can segment their audiences more effectively and create more personalized marketing messages. This will lead to improved lead generation results and a better overall customer experience. One trend that we will see is the development of AI-powered segmentation. AI-powered segmentation uses artificial intelligence to create segments based on a variety of factors, including demographics, interests, and behavior. AI-powered segmentation is still in its preliminary stages, but it has the potential to revolutionize audience segmentation. By understanding the latest trends, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and improve their lead generation results. Do you want to ensure that you’re properly using audience segmentation in your digital advertising efforts? Reach out to our team today for a free strategy call.