One of the keys to effective marketing is determining what segments will be most likely to purchase a company’s product or service. Clients often tell us their audience is made up of knowledge workers, sales people, engineers or some other general description. However this description is overly broad and doesn’t do much to support a data-based marketing plan.
The issue becomes particularly important when launching a new product where initial purchase rates can often spell the difference between retaining or losing corporate support. It’s also critical in the two-level sales typical of the B2B marketplace where a firm often understands its direct customers well; however, they typically know little about that customer’s customers or employees.
One of our clients has thousands of corporate clients, representing millions of employees. This firm, an insurance company, had already sold employers term life insurance as a company-paid employee benefit. Our client wanted to leverage its sizeable market share and customer relationships to sell those employers’ employees additional life insurance that would allow the employee to more fully protect their family.
For this client, the business question was where to start? Which employers to target first? Here’s how we tackled the project
1. We identified which industries’ employees were most likely to purchase the product and compared those results to government data to see where our client was “outperforming” industry averages.
2. Next we characterized the outperforming industries to gain insights as to the nature of their employees and developed a segmentation.
3. We then married the industry and employee segmentation results with salary data and insurance purchase rates.
4. We created a tool called a “Heat Map” that showed our clients which employee segments were most likely to purchase.
The result? The client was able to significantly grow their voluntary life insurance busineses because they:
- Understood which firms to target first
- Were able to develop a compelling value proposition for both employers and employees
- Were able to develop a comprehensive marketing program based on data
Are your marketing efforts paying off? We can help you understand where those hot prospects are and how to appeal to them.
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