The Power of Customer Segmentation

Tom Nixon (00:01.983)
Okay, Curtis, we are entering the home stretch of season one of bull horns and bulls eyes, right? And I’m realizing now we’re getting to the end and we have today an episode that we should have started with all along. We’re putting the beginning part at the end part now, because we’re going to talk about all the things that you should do before you start marketing out into the wilderness, right?

Curtis Hays (00:23.969)
which I’m guessing you’re gonna say we’re gonna talk about who your audience

Tom Nixon (00:29.969)
in understanding not only who they are, but why they are, what their favorite word, why. Yep, exactly. So, but we’re actually going to bring in an expert who does this sort of thing every day, day in and day out and has much more expertise than you or I. And we’re going to hear from some of the advanced techniques behind understanding audience. And we’ll get into the word segmentation in just a minute. But to do so, why don’t we invite on our guest today, which

Curtis Hays (00:35.255)
There’s that Y again.

Tom Nixon (00:57.927)
friend to the show friend to hopefully us and it’s Emily Belak who is director with the Martech group Emily welcome to the podcast.

Emily (01:07.736)
Thank you guys so much for having me. I appreciate it. Excited to be here.

Tom Nixon (01:10.877)
Yeah. We’re excited to have you. We’ve known each other for a few years now. So, we’ve got, personally have gotten to know your expertise, but for those of our audience who does not know the MarTech group, just explain what it is that you do at a high

Emily (01:26.528)
Absolutely. So we are a market research consulting firm on the smaller side. consider ourselves a boutique firm and we help our clients to solve problems they have and answer questions they have, you know, runs the gamut of understanding their market, their customer, what’s going on with their competitors, having intelligence around their products. So all sorts of different research based,

projects every day.

Tom Nixon (01:56.829)
Yeah, and I was kind of joking with Curtis in the open because Curtis and I both insist on some level of research or data whenever we’re going into any marketing campaign. A lot of times we have clients that just want to jump into tactics. Hey, Google ads or Facebook or whatever it is. And it’s sometimes a challenge to get them to slow down and say, well, hold on. Do we know exactly why we’re doing this? Do you know who your audience is in the reflexes?

Of course I know who my audience is really our audience could be anybody or our audiences, our audiences, business owners. Right. And so that doesn’t really get to the sophistication that the Martek group would insist on. would imagine it, when you’re talking about audiences, we’re getting much more granular than just demographics. Are

Emily (02:43.042)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, understanding who your audience has several different layers to it, I would say, of course, you’re going to have a high level quick summary of who your audience is. But you can have all sorts of different ways to think about your audience. And that could, of course, be demographics, it could be regionality, could be attitudes, could be behaviors, preferences, emotions, there’s all sorts of firm

for our B2B friends, right? There’s all sorts of different ways to think about who makes up your audience and ways to think about different groups within that audience.

Tom Nixon (03:22.397)
Yeah. It eventually this is going to be data that marketers will and should use to execute campaigns, Curtis. And I know you’re good at observing behaviors. So past events and stuff and what isn’t there an added layer that you as a digital marketer would want to have in terms of understanding the maybe psycho graphics that goes into these behaviors that you’re observing and tracking and trying to predict online.

Curtis Hays (03:49.953)
Yes. I mean, we want to connect. guess if you’re talking psychographics, I think you want to connect likely the messaging that you have on any single ad or page to your target audience. And I think oftentimes, even if you’ve identified who your customer is from a company perspective, maybe the decision makers within that company have different motivators, different things that are important to them. And so.

You know, I think you have that level of segmentation even within target accounts to say, well, we’re targeting the business owner and the CFO and what makes the business owner tick and what’s important to him might be different than who the CFO is. And so tailoring, you know, the messaging or tailoring the journey and then measuring is what we kind of do well. It’s measuring that journey and measuring the effectiveness of campaigns and those types of things to inform whether or

What we’re putting out there is resonating, whether they’re continuing their journey and learning more about the brand, whether they’re, you know, actually converting on a campaign, clicking a call to action, filling out a form, downloading some piece of content, any one of those types of things.

Tom Nixon (05:03.091)
Yeah. Emily Curtis is bringing up a couple of words that I’ve heard you talk about a lot, which is a segmentation. He didn’t use that word, but be journey. Right. And so explain to maybe the novice or semi novice marketer business owner, what you mean by audience segmentation, because I don’t think it’s what most people think it is that, you know, they try to put people in buckets along maybe demographic lines, but you guys get more granular and more sophisticated than that. Don’t you?

Emily (05:13.888)
and

Emily (05:32.15)
Yeah, definitely. segmentation can have a lot of different meanings to different people, right? So you can segment pretty much any market, any audience, anything. I would consider that like a lowercase segment, right? Like different product segments or whatever.

The segmentation we do when we’re thinking about an audience, typically it’s customers, but we’ve also done employee segmentations, franchisee segmentations, any kind of population of people is a statistical data -driven method of understanding, identifying unique groups within that population or audience that behave similarly or act similarly. There’s different types of segmentation too.

A common one is needs -based segmentation. So essentially it’d be taking a customer group, for example, segmenting them against statistically significantly based on the needs that they have. So when they’re purchasing something, they need ABC or do they need XYZ? so, you know, understanding if they’re in the ABC bucket helps you to better market to them, understand what they’re looking

you know, approach them, message to them, speak to them, all of those things that marketers are doing every day versus the group that wants X, Y, Z, right? You know that they behave differently. They want different things. They have different preferences. So you’re going to approach them in a very different way often.

Tom Nixon (07:04.871)
Which is important because I’m thinking of one of the examples you and I have discussed in the past. You could have audiences that maybe on paper look like the same person, say a 42 year old mother of four who wants to enroll their kids in swim lessons or something like that, right?

And then you might have another 42 year old woman mother of four who goes to the same exact place, right? Buys the same things, but maybe has two toll. These can be two totally different buyer personas, right? So now I’m introducing another word persona. So you need to segment them and say one of these people values instruction. The other one values maybe convenience. I mean, you fill in the blanks, but

How do you separate the people who are exact lookalikes demographically, are two totally different

Emily (07:56.27)
Great question. So one of the main things I would speak to first would be emotions. So when I think about a 42 year old mother of four, I’m thinking stressed, right? You’ve got a bunch of kids in different activities and you’re trying to make your schedule work and you’re trying to drop kid one off here and pick up kid number two there.

There’s a lot of emotions that just are part of our daily lives as human beings, and they really do drive and affect the way that we interact with brands, products, and services. So in your swim school example, you could have right that mom who’s really stressed and she’s there and she’s got two of her four kids there and she’s got two other activities, but you could have another mom who’s got one kid and this is their whole activity for the evening and they’re really excited to be there and they love their swim instructor.

Tom Nixon (08:22.495)
Thank

Tom Nixon (08:45.631)
So I think we already have a of students from our department. Because those two, obviously, in the connection for today, are having very different experiences in this race. So it’s mostly not the first person thing. So I’ve never seen anything that can come up with on this thing. It’s all right. That’s all students from our department. way you should today, those already those, know, those students, right, that are the most different students. So I know the way we have them on the program.

Emily (08:48.704)
And so those two moms and potentially their kids are having very different experiences, right? So it comes down to the customer experience. So by understanding, can, we call it a typing tool, right? That helps to inform how you should typify those moms, right? Or those different segments. So by knowing that mom number one falls into segment one where she’s stressed and has a lot going

Tom Nixon (09:11.903)
into perspective, how you are used to us and how you are doing what you can see through your language and through your apologies and from your experience and you will become number two because you are happy and excited and are a phenomenal person and you are a popular person.

Emily (09:16.684)
you can speak to her and treat her in different ways that give her a better experience than you would mom number two, who’s happy and excited. And by knowing what persona she falls under, you’re going to approach her in a different way, right? Like she might not need as much support or communication, right? There’s different tools I think that we help our clients to use from a strategy perspective.

Tom Nixon (09:37.375)
there’s a difference between the head and It’s always nice to use the stripping perspective.

Emily (09:45.368)
to best make sure that we’re meeting our customers where they are and best meeting their needs.

Tom Nixon (09:50.377)
Yep. And then back before we kick it back to Curtis, because the other point he made was on journey. So, I know that you will create actual personas. You’ll try to personify these various types, right? So you might say stressed out Susan is a character archetypes. And then happy Hannah is somebody different because that allows you a, kind of like emotionally attached to these people, I would think. But then it allows you to, to follow their journey and say stressed out Susan,

When she comes here, she’s experiencing these types of things. When she leaves here, she’s experiencing these types of things or happy Hannah conversely. you start, I would imagine this journey before they even become a customer. And then it doesn’t end after they convert back to Curtis’s other word. It continues on, doesn’t it until for the lifespan of the client and even beyond.

Emily (10:37.292)
Yeah. So the journey is also a super important part of understanding your audience. Right. And we preach that although you might have a similar journey for different personas or segments, they’re going to be different enough that you need to, you know, do the exercise for each of them. So that’s when a journey map comes into play and understanding the emotions along that journey really is so important because again, you can meet your customers where exactly they are.

but it can be as far reaching as, especially for something like Swim School, where it’s a repeat transaction, right? You’re going, it’s a membership based organization, so you’re going every week. It can be months and years potentially of trying to maintain that great relationship and that great customer experience. Whereas for some other brands, it’s a really focused stage, a quick transaction, right? So you could have different segments that interact.

with just a purchase process or one example would be returns, right? If you have to return something to Amazon, it’s kind of a pain. You have to print out the label. You have to box it back up. So they’ve found ways to make it easier. You can drop it off at Whole Foods or Kohl’s. You can just bring an open box, right? So understanding the pain points along that journey really helps at least our clients to, you know, design new experiences that give their customer

kind of a better taste in our mouth at end of the day.

Tom Nixon (12:08.115)
Yeah, absolutely. Chris, I wanted to go back to you on journey because we’ve talked in the past, I think on this podcast, if not certainly offline about too many times or in the past, people used to measure journey like a start point and an end point. And the end point was pass fail. was, they convert or not? Did they buy my product? And that was all they measured. And even Google’s changed the way that they measure the journey with the events. So how does

From a data standpoint, where does the journey begin for you and where do you want to continue to see data? it forever and ever and ever?

Curtis Hays (12:42.305)
Yes. mean, again, depending on the company, if it’s a single purchase and then they’re, they’re done. But usually we’ve talked about this in some of the marketing models. but like I use that race model, which the E is engaged. it, the journey doesn’t end after the purchase, right? The, the, journey continues on with customer service. It continues on, you know,

that person may be being an advocate and affiliate for your brand is now bringing in referrals and those types of things. So, that, was the big message that I heard from them. is, know, this, this involves much more than just marketing. It’s it involves, you know, all operational, you know, components of the business. so understanding that journey from, you know, unaware all the way through, is, super important. And,

You know, I, I think I, I liken this in the way that we end up running a lot of campaigns for customers is, know, you think it’s a straight and narrow thing from the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel and everybody sort of fits into a single journey. And what, what I heard you just say is like, well, maybe based on some interactions or identifying certain personas that they have different experiences with your communications based on, you know, previous behavior.

And the ability to provide that personalization is certainly technology that’s available today, whether you’re able to personalize a website, the homepage message after somebody has interacted with a piece of content, the second time they come to the website, they get something different. And Amazon, you mentioned Amazon, Emily, they’re brilliant at this, right? You, you look at certain types of products, you leave the platform, you come back the next day and lo and behold, you know, I needed.

A ceiling fan and here’s recommendations for ceiling fans. You know, I’m shopping stuff for my garden and you know, here’s pots and tools and you know, fertilizers and all kinds of things that they’re providing to me because I’m in market for that product. Right. So, yeah, I think, I think that’s all smart. And you look at the big brands who are doing it really well and say, Hmm, you know, how could I maybe implement that in my business? research who your customer is first know that well.

Tom Nixon (15:01.243)
Yeah. And Emily, I know you’re a huge advocate for this personalization of the customer experience, right? Cause we’re talking about the customer. This is the customer experience too, in mapping all of that out. So, what sort of other examples that you’ve seen of companies being successful with this personalization that Curtis is talking about based on audience segmentation.

Emily (15:01.496)
Well,

Emily (15:22.07)
Yeah. I I think that as personalized as you can make the experience, you’re going to drive loyalty and advocacy, which are two, you know, kind of the ending stages of a typical journey, right? Post purchase, are you loyal? Do you come back the next time you need that thing? And are you an advocate? Right. We talk about NPS and ways to become a brand affiliate, right? And really just the mouthpiece for a brand. So,

One great example, I think of kind of more personalization along a journey. If you recall, Delta is like the gold standard for customer experience. They do so many good things. And one of the examples I love about how they’ve provided a great customer experience on a personal level is, do you remember?

you used to check your bag at the airport and then it would just be kind of in the abyss and you didn’t know exactly where it was and then you just hope that it was at you know the baggage claim and you landed now delta has been able to track your bag for you onto the plane off of the plane so you know exactly where it is so that’s something you can just open your app see yep my bag is now on the plane right like it’s just those small things that i i shouldn’t call it a small thing i don’t know what effort that took on delta’s end to do that but

It feels like a kind of small thing as the customer, but it’s reassuring. it goes from making you, again, to bring up those emotions. It goes from making you feel nervous, anxious, some kind of unpleasant emotion to reassured. And you you’ve got a stronger connection with Delta now, and now you’re probably going to go back to Delta the next time you need to fly because of those small touches that really just make a huge difference to somebody’s experience.

Tom Nixon (16:42.591)
is to build a new time scale so that the trust of our residents will be insured, right? So what was the point of making these events to prevent this from happening? Because we’re making these, we’re less anxious, so we’re more focused on making sure that the events that we’ve a sure number of people insured.

Tom Nixon (17:08.159)
Yeah, and then you mentioned advocacy. you’re measuring. Okay, this is well after the purchase. You’ve already bought a ticket. You’re actually already on the plane. So they consider that, you know, they could just be like, well, we got our money. So that’s done. But so much extends beyond that, which goes back to Curtis. I want to give you the opportunity to preach again about the importance of measuring the lifetime value of a customer.

Tom Nixon (17:33.848)
And we’ve got $3 ,000 in sales. So our, generated $2 ,000 and that’s it. Right. That’s not the way to look at it. It informs not only your marketing, but your evaluation of the marketing to consider the entire lifespan. Right.

Curtis Hays (17:49.397)
Right. Yeah. You have to take a look at the products or services that you offer. Understand if you’re offering products, do those customers repeat purchase? How frequently do they, you know, what’s the revenue from that? So you’re going to need some historical data to figure these things out. If it’s service offering, you offer contracts, what’s your average length of contract that customers say and those types of things. And then you can put a value to it. So Mario,

We talk about a lot, did a really good job of this. Who’s in the business of home care. And unfortunately in their business, they can’t predict potentially how long somebody is going to live when they come in and start providing care. It could be another 10 years. They have situations where they come in and it’s a day or two. So what they have to do is over time, take based off the services they’re going to provide to that client, some sort of calculation to say,

Okay, we anticipate this being a year. We anticipate this type of client being two years, whatever that is, add in that lifetime value. And now we have the ability to use that to calculate the effectiveness of marketing that we’re doing. Or say we change some marketing tactics that we can look at the efficiency from that. When new business comes in, we have that calculation. I would just say be consistent with that. can’t change.

The way you do that calculation midway through and expect it to relate to the previous, but, you know, certainly, and I think that opens the doors to opportunities to find, you know, efficiencies. Do you have opportunities if you’re selling a product, do you have an opportunity to do a subscription for that product to create that loyalty, to make it easier? I buy coffee off of subscript subscription. There are pain points to it, but there are good points to it as well. So, you know, but that keeps me loyal.

Tom Nixon (19:42.707)
Mm

Curtis Hays (19:45.859)
That easiness of and reminder of always making sure that I have fresh coffee that’s arriving at my house every couple of weeks.

Tom Nixon (19:54.569)
Yep.

The great thing about Mario, and if you’re wondering who Mario is, you just tuned in our first three episodes of this season of the podcast was sort of like a case study in follow the trajectory of Mario from not knowing how to spell marketing. I kid Mario, the first three letters are in your name. So you probably had it, but all the way to now he’s very sophisticated. If he, my takeaway from that case study is they measure everything because if they measure everything, they can track everything and they can also do these projections or these calculations. The one thing he factored into it is the likelihood to refer.

So if a customer comes in and have a great experience, some percentage of those will refer another person who also has lifetime value. And so now if you can calculate that and do some prognostication, then you can really understand the true value of the client. So back to Emily. Exactly.

Curtis Hays (20:39.521)
And that’s how they originally built the business. Was built, was based off of referrals, right? So that just, that was a really important factor. So it was important for them to consider. But now they’re doing other marketing activities that they want to measure similar to what, how they were measuring the referrals. And so you’ve got to incorporate all of those different things and into calculating that value, right? It’s almost like their own algorithm, basically.

Tom Nixon (20:59.635)
Yeah. Exactly. Then.

Emily (21:00.279)
I

That’s such an important point about the referrals and the word of mouth though, because in our journey mapping research that we do across all kinds of different industries, different types of buyers, one of the leading reasons or influencers on somebody’s purchase decision is, this a referral? Was it a word of mouth recommendation from somebody else? And it’s almost always the number one thing that people consider the most impactful thing, right? If you know somebody that had a positive experience with the product or service,

you’re more likely to engage with them. Right. So then that advocacy on the back end of the journey becomes somebody else’s starting point on their journey. And it’s just this cycle that you need to continue. Like brands need to spend time making sure that that cycle continues because it leads to loyal customers. It’s doing the work for you. Right. Like if you have a great experience for your customers, they’re going to become advocates and you’re going to get new business from that. So it’s worth it on, you know, top and bottom line as well.

Tom Nixon (22:03.787)
You said at the outset, when you described to the Martech group, as you, think said it as we’re market research consultants. So you don’t just go do a bunch of surveys and say, here’s your data. Good luck. Right. So you will go in and take the extra step to look for opportunities based on what you found. So you found these interesting things in the customer journey. found either gaps or opportunities. And though it’s not your place to re -engineer the customer experience for the client, you will go in, right. And say, here’s an opportunity for you, a referral based business.

to get more referrals. Cause here’s what the client is experiencing at the point of do we promote or don’t we promote,

Emily (22:42.102)
Yeah, all the time. had a client a couple years ago that was like a luxury athletic chain. And, you know, if you’re spending big bucks on a really nice athletic club, that’s the word of mouth is so imperative. Right. So that was one of our recommendations for them, right. Was build up your, they already had, a referral kind of program,

What can we do to optimize that to drive more people to do it? How can we incentivize that? So we had some ideas for them around that, right? Which is totally more of the consulting piece of it. We like to take the research that we’re doing and then find new ways to apply that and make it actionable for our clients so that they’re actually getting value out of it. Right? Like so many firms just kind of will run a survey and be like, here you go. Here’s your results. Here’s the

And we’ve seen some of those reports and it’s pretty sad because it’s like just a bunch of charts and it’s like, okay, great. But tell me what I can do with this, make it more actionable and realistic and something that, you know, we can work into part of our strategy rather than just a data

Tom Nixon (23:51.613)
Yeah. In, what are the things I’ve gotten to know the MarTech group? Obviously, I know some of your processes before in a prior life, I had a research boutique. We were big on though, just small format, qual, what I would call qualitative. would call qualitative research, interviews with people, small focus group, conversation groups. didn’t call them focus groups.

With the access to data now that you, would think that the temptation would be for a firm to go out and just say, well, I can scrape the internet and get every answer I need, or I can deploy AI and I can get all of the information I need. But I know that you guys, your firm always emphasizes this blend of qualitative and quantitative and maybe some more qualitative at the end. Can you explain just, mean, people probably know what those two are, but why you guys insist on having a blend of the two and why it’s more effective.

Emily (24:41.647)
And we use those tools too, right? We use AI, we use web scraping. You need a holistic picture. And in order to do that, you need to use all the tools at your disposal. Qualitative, we love before a quantitative because it helps to inform what we’re saying and asking in the quant. So the qualitative really helps us to understand the right questions to ask, but also anticipate the answers we’re going to get. So

whether it’s, how are you feeling at this stage of the journey? I feel nervous or I feel excited. That could be one thing that now we know the answer is going into the survey phase. But it could just be more depth, right, in understanding the why behind something. So we love to do qualitative first before quantitative, especially when we’re talking about, you know, a segmentation project where we’re looking at different types of people within an audience because

You’re really understanding the emotions, the motivators, the drivers for some of their behaviors. Whereas in the quant, if you just did a survey, you might see those behaviors, but you’re not getting the full picture because you’re not getting the understanding of why. And then we also like to do qualitative often on the backend as well after the quantitative simply to kind of bring those personas and segments to life. So we’ll pick a few people from each segment.

do a video call with them, record it and get all of that kind of rich, in their words, what their emotions are, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, why they behave the way they do. And then we’ll tell our clients, look, here’s your segment number one. This is exactly what they said about these topics. Here’s segment number two. And it really helps to bring those personas to life, personify them, hence personas.

Tom Nixon (26:33.641)
So Curtis, imagine somebody like Emily hasn’t done the work for you. Think back to actual real world, actually. Have you ever felt like when you start with a client, they’ve asked for something, maybe they’ve asked for a tactic. And have you ever felt like, geez, I feel like I’m flying blind. I just don’t have enough information, right? You say that happens all the time. And so, and so then what do you want them to do? What, what do you wish the client could wave a magic wand and tell you?

Curtis Hays (26:53.131)
All the time, yeah.

Curtis Hays (27:02.091)
Yeah, well, I want them to tell me who their customer is and why their customers buy from them.

Tom Nixon (27:09.555)
And why do you need that though? Can’t you just like, just go put some Google ads up and just go let it run.

Curtis Hays (27:14.307)
Well, you can, the likelihood of getting the results you’d like to receive from it is going to be a lot lower if you don’t know these things. Right. So if you don’t know where a prospective customer is at in their journey, as you’re doing this tactic, because different tactics potentially happen at different points in the journeys. So if you’re not meeting them where they’re at with your communications.

Your likelihood of them taking the next step is going to be a lot lower. Okay. We’ve mentioned it a few times here, which I love this example is just like doing lead Jen before you’ve done any other type of marketing. That’s taking this leap where you’re asking for the last thing in the journey first. So I’m asking you to request a demo when you literally know nothing about our brand up till this point. Right. So,

Those are the types of things. the business comes to you with a problem. They’re coming to me and saying, we want more leads or we want you to do ads because you know, we think we can get more demo requests. And then you start to ask these questions and they haven’t done anything up until that point, which, so as you asked me this question, I was thinking of a question for Emily, which is like at what point in

company’s sort of maturity, is it the right stage for them to reach out to an organization like Martech and do this, right? Is it like based on maybe what the costs are associated with it that you need to be doing X amount of revenue in order to be able to see the results or do you even see startups?

that maybe just have a little bit of funding should be doing this because then they’re going to get off the ground, you know, in a much better place than trying to figure this all out on their own, which are likely going to get it wrong then anyway, you know. So what’s your recommendation there of like, should I get started with something like this? is it everyone should just, if you haven’t done it now, should get started with

Emily (29:23.436)
Yeah, great.

Emily (29:32.782)
probably the latter, right? If you haven’t done it, I would recommend it. I think that there is a point in time when probably not at the very beginning when a company, a startup is still kind of figuring things out, but once they get to a point where they’re in growth mode and they’re seeing a ton of business coming in and want to be more strategic with something like messaging.

communication, advertising, how they speak to those audiences. I think there is a little bit of maturity needed from that perspective in order to be able to formulate a strategy around their audience and how they’re gonna do that. So I would say, not like day two of a new company, but somewhere where they’re a little bit mature enough that they are able to kind of move into that strategic mode.

That said, I also think it’s important to make sure it’s refreshed often. So you can run a segmentation scheme like we’ve mentioned on firmographics, demographics, behaviors, right? So we did, I’ll just give you a few examples of things we’ve done recently, but we did a project for a dry cleaning franchise and we kind of looked at needs, right? What is the customer segment needs? So we had.

one segment that was really interested in delivery. So they wanted all of their clothes delivered back to them. One that was just about convenience. One that was, it’s an environmentally friendly brand. wanted to, you know, that’s where they wanted to spend their dollars was with an environmentally friendly brand, right? We did, so that was kind of based on what they need. And that was for a fairly commodity type service, right? Dry cleaning. We did one where with buyers of human resources software. So that was,

for that one, we ended up looking at jobs to be done. So what do you need from the HR software? What jobs specifically do you need to be done? And that helped us to segment based on, this group needs payroll, this group needs compensation management or like performance management, right? So there were different groups within those jobs to be done and what exactly they needed. So there’s all kinds of different ways to think about it. And

Emily (31:51.182)
You know, you might have one that works for you for five or 10 years, but perhaps you’ve matured to another point as a company or a brand, and you need to take another look at that segmentation scheme to really understand what is most strategic for you

Tom Nixon (32:08.182)
Is it also a sense, Emily, not every listener to this podcast is going to be, wow, I think I really need a segmentation analysis done on my customer base. But isn’t it more to Curtis’s question of when, isn’t it like these nagging questions that you don’t know the answers to, such as we’re losing market share in a certain area or we’re not retaining the way we used to retain. Loyalty’s gone down. We just don’t understand why. So isn’t it just more like this feeling like I don’t know what I don’t

and that’s we know we’re underperforming or we know we’re missing opportunities but we don’t know why can’t this be a trigger to say I need to call them Emily

Emily (32:47.747)
Yeah, I mean, I think if it’s anything related to customers, right, there’s something going on. Your loyal customers historically are no longer loyal or, you know, there’s a new brand in the market and we know customers are shifting there. Why any of those types of questions you can really even yet to your point market share sales related things, what’s going on? It’s so helpful as a first step to do the segmentation before

even dig another layer deeper simply because if you dig that layer deeper first, it might not be as actionable because you’re not going to know who is causing the problem. So if you first lay out the landscape, then you can go a layer deeper and be like, okay, it’s segment two that’s causing this problem. We need to round them up and we need to fix what’s going on with that group rather than just kind of being

Tom Nixon (33:28.591)
Mm.

Emily (33:41.496)
There’s problems going on, I don’t know who’s going to help me fix it. I don’t know how to find the people that are being affected by this competitor, this decision, or this new product or whatever.

Tom Nixon (33:52.991)
Right, yeah. OK, cool. This is great. Last question, Emily. So what is your either your best pro tip or the thing that you want people maybe it’s a biggest mistake people make when they’re doing work like this, things they forget to ask or just your best pro tip for people who would go through some level of research like this on their customers?

Emily (34:14.862)
Yeah, it’s funny. I was talking this morning with two different people, both at big brands you’ve heard of, and they have not looked at the emotions that people are feeling. And I think that that is so important because you can estimate, you can guess, you can do a handful of interviews, 20 interviews, and have somebody tell you the same thing, but until you can measure those emotions at scale and really quantify how people are feeling.

And whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, active or passive, inward or outward, all of those different ways of thinking about emotions really are so impactful on a customer’s experience, how they interact with the brand during their journey, how they perceive touch points, right? We’ll do like a touch point index where we look at how satisfied are different groups of people with the touch points that are in place on their journey. And some groups are so mad, right?

You have a classic example of an older person wants to call customer service, but a younger person wants to just chat, right? Making sure that the experience we offer to, well, I say we, like I’m one of my clients, making sure that the experience that a brand offers to their customers meets them where they are, takes into account the emotions that they’re feeling at each stage, and not only, I guess, capitalizes on it, but make sure

Tom Nixon (35:33.065)
These are the more tasteful of the emotions that they’re feeling at each stage. Not only are they a person, but they’re also trying to indicate to the audience to not do this to us. So they’re to make they’re doing this to us because we’re just a

Emily (35:42.58)
you know, mitigate those pain points, challenges, gaps to make sure that, you know, they’re giving their customer the best possible experience. think that that’s probably the most important thing. And the thing that I keep hearing customer or brands are not doing right now is looking at the emotional side of things on a more data -driven strategic way.

Tom Nixon (36:03.133)
I’m living proof because I was so loyal to this one particular car brand before I could even drive. It was, want to own one of these cars. finally did. And, I had one bad experience with one service technician at one shop at the dealership. And he made me feel like an idiot. And I vowed right there. I’m never buying that car again. Now the brand, the car OEM has nothing to do with that person has no knowledge of the interaction, right? If they’re not studying it, but that turned me from a lifelong

I will never go back because I really, I buy from this particular company, I’d need to go through this server shaft. think I might be long gone, but to your point, like the, the emotion I felt at that moment is something I never want to experience again. So sorry.

Emily (36:35.542)
Yeah.

Emily (36:48.65)
Exactly. And employees are such a big mouthpiece for brands often, right? We do a lot of work with franchise clients and again, the swim school example or home health care or, you know, an early childhood education brand, their employees are the face of the company. So if you’re employing somebody that is not happy with their experience, they might lead to a negative experience like that, like you just described, right?

that’s a whole other thing we can talk about would be like making sure the employee experience is good in order for the customer experience to be good. But the emotions are just so, you know, whether it’s rational or not, just tied to our, way we perceive pretty much everything. understanding those are absolutely critical to designing a really positive customer experience.

Curtis Hays (37:39.107)
Yeah, this is where brand doesn’t just like marketing isn’t the only group that’s involved in it, right? So just the example I’ll provide is we saw this with a client. We were measuring behavior on a website and saw that people wanted to interact with the brand, not through a form on the website or through a chat or anything like that. They wanted to call. And so we worked with leadership to make changes, to drive more phone calls to about seven different locations they had.

they offer a number of different products as well as services. And, we had call recording set up and unfortunately there wasn’t training that happened on the frontline as the people who are receiving the calls. And actually even had people who were answering the phones and saying things like, yeah, we don’t actually offer that product. When, when that location maybe didn’t, but another location that’s 15 miles down the road does, and had the opportunity.

You know, to say, we don’t offer it at our location, but if you’d like to, I’ll transfer you, or even if you couldn’t transfer, you know, here’s the location to call, talk to George there, he’ll get you set up, you know? And so that experience was then detrimental to really the marketing that we were doing. And so, you know, you really, you really have to think of this holistically. And I think the last thing I’ll say is when you’re, when you’re doing marketing.

You really can’t afford to guess. And I think a lot of times our clients are trying to do guesswork. It’s they they’re guessing, what the message should be. They’re guessing of what they think is most important to a potential buyer. And this guesswork creates waste. So my advice is, you know, if you do have a significant spend from a marketing perspective, stop guessing.

and go and do the research so you don’t have to guess anymore.

Tom Nixon (39:37.523)
Right. Yep. Yeah. I companies sometimes who will, if they don’t already embrace everything, Emily and her company spouses, it’s because they’re afraid to like hit the pause button. Like we don’t have time. We need to generate leads and you will speed it up by slowing it down. I guarantee you. So Emily, thank you so much for joining us. We’ll have you back. You just already ticked off a topic for our next conversation. I can’t wait to do that. People can learn more about Martek at martekgroup .com. Emily Belak.

director. Are you on LinkedIn? Should we include your LinkedIn in the show notes as

Emily (40:11.624)
I am, yep. Hit me up, I’m here. Thanks so much for having me, guys.

Tom Nixon (40:16.303)
Alright, well, thank you for being and we’ll see you in season two of Bullhorns and Bullseyes.

Emily (40:21.72)
Sounds good.