Segmentation is at the heart of successful marketing. It helps B2B marketers meet customer needs, personalize their message, and boost conversion and retention. Geographic segmentation further enables you to refine your audience and target potential customers based on their geographical location.
In this blog, we’ll dive into geographic market segmentation in detail and understand why you must include it in your GTM strategy.
What is Geographic Segmentation?
There are five types of market segmentation to find the right target audience- demographic, psychographic, firmographic, behavioral, and geographic segmentation. While many B2B marketers often overlook geographic segmentation, it can do wonders for your GTM strategy.
Geographic segmentation in marketing is the process of dividing your leads into different groups based on their location so you can better serve prospects in a particular area. This area can be a country, state, city, region, climate zone, or zip code.
Your prospects’ location significantly influences their buying habits and decision-making, which you can use to optimize your GTM strategy and better plan your pipeline.
Importance of Geographic Segmentation in B2B
The first step to building an effective GTM strategy is knowing your customer. You must know who they are, their pain points, the solution they’re looking for, and where they’re located. Yes, their location matters too. Why?
Suppose you’re planning to expand operations in the US Pacific Northwest. Segmenting customers based on location will ensure you’re targeting businesses in Washington and Oregon. This allows you to use your resources effectively and drive maximum ROI by reaching out to the right prospects and preventing inefficient spending.
Moreover, it can be challenging to market your product or service effectively to businesses in different countries. This is because they will have different requirements, different languages, different ways of communication, different values, different business cultures, etc. Therefore, a marketing strategy that works well in the US might not work at all in, say, Asia.
Geographic segmentation allows you to understand your target audience’s unique pain points and preferences and create a marketing strategy that appeals to them in each location.
Geographic segmentation analysis is also easier to perform than other market segmentation types. It is easier to determine your prospects’ location than to identify their behavioral or psychographic tendencies. Geographic segmentation also enables you to identify different compliances that your product or service must meet in different regions.
Benefits of Target Audience Geographic Segmentation
1. Simple Implementation
Compared to popular segmentation types like behavioral or firmographic, geographic segmentation requires fewer data points, making it easy to implement. This allows you to create effective and personalized marketing campaigns directed at key decision-makers of businesses in your target location.
2. Better Customer Insights
With geographic segmentation, businesses can identify locations with the maximum leads and leverage geotargeting tools to gain insights into key decision-makers, like their buying and spending habits. This enables B2B marketers to optimize their marketing efforts, like sending targeted emails or setting up display advertising in the area.
3. Better Competitor Insights
It’s crucial to perform a competitive analysis before marketing your product or service to prospects. Segmenting your customers based on geography helps you with this too. It allows you to identify competitors in these specific locations and analyze their marketing strategies. At the same time, you can also identify the reservations your target audience may have for your competitor’s solutions.
4. Improved ROI
Geographic segmentation helps you identify locations with the most and least competition. Using this information, you can direct your marketing efforts toward businesses in geographies with low competition, as they have greater chances of conversion. This ensures you’re spending your marketing budget reaching relevant B2B customers and maximizing the ROI.
5. Market Growth
When you’re targeting businesses in a specific location, you need to tailor your campaigns according to the local business culture and compliances. With an optimized marketing strategy already in place, it becomes more convenient to use the same strategy for businesses in neighboring locations with similar geographical characteristics. This allows you to expand your operations to new geographies quickly.
Leverage Geographic Segmentation for Your B2B Marketing Strategy
Most B2B marketers prefer behavioral or firmographic segmentation over geographic, but this can significantly impact sales. It helps you create personalized and targeted campaigns, understand geographical differences, and expand to new geographies quickly, boosting your ROI. Geographic segmentation is a simple yet powerful way of reaching potential customers across the world with relevant messaging.
