Higher engagement

In marketing, audience segmentation enables you to craft messages that speak directly to your buyers’ specific needs and motivations. This is particularly important for B2B marketers, who are often faced with multi-stakeholder buying groups (or buying committees) that influence a single purchase at a single company.

For example, a CFO or member of the finance team may focus on budget alignment, payment terms, and total cost of ownership, while technical or IT decision-makers may focus on areas like integration, scalability, and security. By tailoring your content to address unique concerns, you create stronger connections that translate into higher engagement rates, more meaningful conversations, and stronger relationships.

Better customer experience

B2B buyers have come to expect personalization. A McKinsey report found that 76% of B2B buyers get frustrated when they don’t receive relevant interactions. Gartner found that B2B companies that effectively deploy personalized engagement strategies outsell peer companies by up to 30%. Audience segmentation in marketing is a data-driven approach to determining how to effectively personalize message, content (format and subject), and media mix at scale.

Common types of account segmentation

Firmographic segmentation

Companies with similar characteristics often have similar challenges, requirements, and buying processes. Firmographic segmentation focuses on company-level characteristics including industry, company size, revenue, location, and business model. This type of segmentation of your B2B target audience helps you tailor your approach to organizations that are most likely to need your solution and have the budget to purchase it.

Technographic segmentation

Technographic segmentation is a powerful method for B2B audience segmentation that categorizes prospect and customer accounts based on the technologies they use and their level of digital (and increasingly AI) sophistication. This strategy is especially useful for businesses with technology solutions or solutions that require technical integrations. For example, identifying accounts that already use compatible tools in their tech stack allows you to focus your marketing efforts on the most promising opportunities.

Segmentation focused on enterprise technical or digital maturity also also gives you valuable insights into the type of content that will resonate with different audience segments. For example, technical laggards who are slow to adopt new technology may need content focused on the ease of implementation, customer support, and the fundamental benefits of the technology. Early adopters and companies who are more digitally mature are likely more receptive to content about advanced features, innovative use cases, and future applications.

Behavioral segmentation

While most often applied in buying-group-level segmentation, behavioral segmentation can be valuable in account segmentation. In this instance, a target account list might be segmented based on how frequently or how deeply the account is engaging with your brand, content, and digital experiences. Deeper engagement may be a signal of accounts that are ripe for significant marketing investment or custom, account-based-marketing strategies.

For a B2B marketing team accountable for driving demand for a diverse portfolio of solutions, a target account list could also be segmented based on the type of content their employees are engaging with, which might indicate propensity for one product versus another.

Intent-based segmentation

Intent-based segmentation, the practice of segmenting based on buying intent signals, is a highly effective approach to account-level, audience segmentation in B2B marketing. This method segments accounts based on their real-time research and online behavior, which indicates their likelihood to purchase a solution.

For example, Bombora tracks millions of companies’ content consumption across the web, identifying statistically significant changes in behavior that show when a company is actively researching a particular subject relevant to your products. This allows you to prioritize accounts that are “in-market” and ready to buy, enabling sales and marketing teams to deliver highly targeted and timely campaigns that address the specific needs the account is currently researching.

Common types of buyer-group-level segmentation

Demographic segmentation

At the B2B buyer-group level, demographic segmentation categorizes business professionals and company employees based on their professional attributes rather than personal ones. This method classifies members of the buying group by common attributes such as their job title, functional area, seniority, and years of experience.

This type of audience segmentation provides critical insights into things like key concerns and decision-making authority. For example, a campaign targeting technical managers would focus on product specifications and implementation details, while messaging for C-suite executives would emphasize strategic value and return on investment. Ultimately, this practice allows for the precise tailoring of content and messaging to align with the specific role and needs of each member of the buying committee.

Behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation classifies individuals within a buying group based on their actions and engagement with your brand, providing a dynamic view of their interests, sentiment, and intent. This method evaluates interactions such as:
 

• Content consumption (e.g., whitepaper downloads, case study views)
• Website activity (e.g., page visits, pricing page views)
• Campaign engagement (e.g., email click-through rates, webinar attendance)
• Participation in events

For both prospects and existing customers, these actions provide powerful clues about their level of awareness and consideration for your brand and product portfolio, allowing you to tailor messages that are highly relevant to their current needs. The true power of this method emerges when you combine behavioral data with other segmentation types, like firmographics and technographics, to create comprehensive profiles that enable truly personalized and effective outreach.

Psychographic segmentation

In a B2B context, psychographic segmentation goes beyond basic professional data to delve into the psychological and professional drivers that influence a buyer’s decision-making. This method segments individuals based on their attitudes, professional values, and motivations, providing a deeper understanding of what truly drives them. Key psychographic traits include:
 

• Risk tolerance
• Attitude toward innovation
• Problem-solving style

For instance, a risk-averse buyer will be most receptive to messaging that emphasizes security and proven reliability, while an early adopter will be drawn to content highlighting cutting-edge features and competitive advantage. This sophisticated approach enables marketers to create content and messaging that doesn’t just present a product, but strategically aligns with a buyer’s core professional anxieties, aspirations, and operational philosophy.

Intent-based segmentation

Intent data provides granular insight for buyer-group-level segmentation by revealing the real-time research activity of individuals. This approach goes beyond company-wide signals, instead tracking the digital footprint of different members of the buying committee to identify what topics they are actively consuming and with what intensity.

For instance, you can differentiate between a technical leader researching “security protocols” and a procurement manager exploring “leasing terms,” enabling you to deliver highly personalized and relevant messages to each person based on their specific needs and professional concerns. Some marketers also use intent data to gauge the level of influence and intent of key personas at different stages of the buyer journey, enabling truly dynamic segmentation for more targeted outreach.

Mine your existing customer base for insights

Your existing customer base can provide a wealth of intelligence on how best to segment your audience. Look for common and unique attributes that define your most valuable customers or those that buy specific products or groups of products.

Another intelligence gold mine is post-mortems with sales leaders on closed-won and closed-lost accounts. Dig in to understand sales experiences and identify what functions and roles were involved in the journey and what interests and concerns were raised by influencers and decision makers along the way.

Be vigilant about quality

Effective audience segmentation relies entirely on the quality of your underlying data. This is because every segmentation type, from firmographics to behavioral intent, is only as accurate and relevant as the data used to build it. Outdated or inaccurate data can lead to targeting the wrong companies, misidentifying key members of the buying group, and misinterpreting buying signals.

For example, a company’s revenue, employee count, or technology stack can change rapidly, and intent signals are only valuable if they are captured in real-time. Without a focus on data quality, accuracy, and recency, your segmentation efforts will produce flawed audience profiles, resulting in wasted marketing spend, irrelevant messaging, and missed sales opportunities.

Layer segmentation methodologies

Effective segmentation isn’t about choosing just one method; it’s about combining them to build a comprehensive view of your audience. Start with broad, foundational segments like firmographics and then layer in more granular insights. For example, you might segment by firmographics first, then layer on technographics and complete the audience segmentation with differentiation by intent level.

Layering is also a way to effectively combine account level segmentation and buyer-group-level segmentation. CyberRisk Alliance (CRA) provides a great example of combining first-party and third-party behavioral data and intent signals to inform audience segmentation, which resulted in elevated lead quality, conversion rates, and ROI.

Test and refine your audience segmentation

Audience segmentations should be considered living entities that need to evolve as industry landscapes change, competitors emerge, strategic priorities shift, and buyer behaviors develop. Monitor campaign engagement rates, conversion rates, and sales outcomes to identify which segments are working and which might be stalling. And always make sure your data is fresh.

Don’t forget intent

Intent data is one of the most powerful audience segmentation tools. There are many kinds of intent data from a variety of 3rd third-party sources. Most practitioners start by experimenting with a signal source and then, over time, incorporate and combine multiple data sources to refine or enhance the quality of the signal. Consider these key questions when evaluating the intent type and third-party provider that is right for you.

Build a tech stack and partner ecosystem that supports your strategy

Audience segmentations for marketing are only effective if they can be refreshed and activated. To get the most from your tech stack and partner ecosystem:
 

• Invest in building a marketing tech stack (e.g., website identity, CRM, CDP) that can collect and orchestrate your first-party data.
• Build a network of third-party partners that can provide accurate, fresh data signals that can easily flow into your tech stack and be used to enrich and expand first-party data.
• Evaluate digital advertising partners (agencies, data providers, activation platforms) that have the capability to transform audience segmentations into addressable, measurable audiences that can be deployed across digital touchpoints.