Why you need less metrics, but more segments
By segmenting your user base / leads by source, audience and messaging, you can start to generate learnings that can be implemented across your overarching marketing strategy.
When you’re investing in multiple marketing channels at the same time, how can you be sure that your marketing dollars are really going as far as they can? Are you truly reaching the right audience with the best asset on the best channel? And how can you find that out?
Usually, when searching for that answer, I see marketing managers double down on more data. Tracking more metrics, setting up additional tracking tools.
But once you’re accurately tracking the reach, engagement and value of each marketing activity, the most valuable insights are no longer found in additional metrics. They’re, instead, discovered in audience and campaign segmentation.
Segmentation can empower performance teams understand which audiences to target and content teams which articles to write. But that’s not all. Enough of this granular audience segmentation can lead to data that can inform your overarching marketing strategy.

The three types of metrics that marketing does, really, need
Before you start segmenting or slicing any data, there are three questions you need to be able to answer on each of your marketing activities — be it a whitepaper or a paid search campaign.
Those three questions are:
Reach: How many eyeballs, potential leads, or new users are being reached? How big is the volume this initiative is generating?
Engagement: How many of the eyeballs you’re reaching engaging with your offer? Are you reaching people interested in purchasing or learning more about your proposition?
Value: Are the interested leads profitable or valuable for your business? What is the ROI you get from this activity?
Each of these questions can be answered by different signals in the form of metrics and KPIs that come from your sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
With this information on each activity, marketing managers are armed with a strong signal on whether to double down, drop or optimise a certain activity.
Segmenting the data: source, audience, and messaging
With reach, engagement, and value, marketing leaders have an overall pulse on how individual activities perform. However, without segmentation, they are missing the “whys” behind performance:
There’s no clarity on what channels to double down for brand awareness, or what landing pages to build to convert valuable traffic.
This is where segments provide value. In my career, I’ve seen three genres of user segments that influence results the most. They are source, audience and messaging:
Examples of marketing insights that are possible with segmentation
Below, I listed some examples of marketing insights that are possible by segmenting our three metrics (reach, engagement and value) by our three segments (source, audience and messaging):
Users acquired through different marketing sources (e.g. Google Ads and customer referrals) are likely to have different value (e.g. ARPU). Segmentation helps find the channels where you’re reaching the most valuable leads.
Similarly, some channels can be great for generating traffic that’s not ready to convert yet. With this overview, a marketing strategy can be planned where certain channels are dedicated for awareness (reach) and others for consideration or conversion.
Certain use cases or problems are more severe for customers and therefore more valuable for you. Understanding which creatives or landing pages lead to more engagement can help you identify what those use cases are. As a consequence, you can produce more content about that use case and search for other channels where you can reach users experiencing that same problem.
Users with a certain job title can immediately understand the value of your product and have that be identified with a faster activation time. Those users can be engaged by sales and become internal champions of your product.
How a growth agency used segments for their enterprise acquisition strategy
A couple years ago, I worked on a project for a growth marketing agency that was experiencing a pull from a new high value audience they had identified: non-tech first enterprise clients. They wanted a GTM strategy to acquire more leads like them.
Together, we investigated where this audience was coming from. We found out that they were leads that had downloaded an Analytics Stack Guide (messaging) after discovering it through organic search (source).
In my conversations with the sales team, we got an even fuller picture on the audience. We learned that leads belonging to this segment were in the process of modernising their technology (CRM, analytics) stack.

Leads interested in modernising their stack was of high value, but there was few of them
We applied this insight to our targeted GTM strategy:
👉 Performance used the existing leads asset (”Analytics Stack Modernization”) on other paid channels. This increased the number of leads interested in solving the problem.
👉 Content team atomised the guide into smaller articles and even a webinar. This increased the number of leads coming from organic search.
👉 Sales created a pitch deck on the service of modernising a tech stack. This increased the close rate of this audience.
Segmentation can generated learnings for the overarching marketing strategy
Understanding the reach, engagement, and value of each activity is crucial to decide whether to double down, drop, or optimise a certain activity.
By segmenting your user base / leads by source, audience and messaging, you can start to generate learnings that can be implemented across your overarching marketing strategy.
For marketing teams that are already mature enough to know who their best customer is, user segmentation can introduce new opportunities to find and convert more leads like them.
Want to up your segmentation game?
Hi, hi! My name is Barbara and I’m a growth and marketing analytics consultant who has helped companies like WeTransfer, dbt, Gitpod, Microsoft and more.
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