Segmenting Scottish businesses
- Scottish Enterprise
Following a strategic change and the creation of a dedicated marketing resource, our client was challenged to develop themed campaigns centred round customer insights and needs to encourage prospective clients to contact Scottish Enterprise (SE), and be signposted to an appropriate mix of services or support according to their needs.
While the strategy was clear, how to implement it was not! To help realise SE’s ambition, we developed and implemented a B2B segmentation of the domestic Scottish business market, focussing in on the key decision maker at each business. The segmented approach was adopted as it was felt the most appropriate way to meet the key objective of SE in terms of company growth, namely to work with businesses that have the greatest potential to grow Gross Value Add (GVA). Being able to isolate businesses with the greatest potential to grow represent the most cost effective way to met the objective.
We used a four-stage process to develop the segmentation, which included:
- Colleague and stakeholder immersion: engage internal colleagues and create set of
behavioural indicators of growth and prospect needs for quantification
- Quantification and segment build: identify, predict & segment indicators of growth
behaviour & ‘favourability’ to SE using primary quantitative research data
- Segment insight generation: get closer to the segments through qualitative research, generate
pen-portraits and insights about segments so as to inform marketing & treatment strategies
- Migration of segmentation to prospect database: Isolate segments on prospect databases to
enable future implementation success
The resulting segmentation divided Scottish business into four types, and after a full internal immersion programme, product & services are now being developed to meet the needs of the target segments and it is now being used to drive marketing strategy and implementation.
