How to use Marketo Segmentation for Dynamic Content

Know your customer.

It is almost a marketing commandment and certainly a tried-and-true rule for personalization. Understanding your customers through personas, data collection, and segmentation is one of the most important functions of your marketing team.

For marketing operations teams, this understanding of customers should be codified in the data. This means personas aren’t just pin-ups on a boardroom wall or Miro board; they are living, breathing artifacts that can be used in reporting, analysis, and, yes, marketing activities.

In Marketo, the Segmentation features let you organize your customers into groups or segments based on different characteristics. This feature isn’t just helpful for reporting; it’s also a key component of enabling dynamic content and personalization in your marketing assets.

In this post, we will explore Marketo’s Segmentation feature and how you can use it to enable marketing personalization.

Understanding Marketo’s Segmentation

What are Segmentations in Marketo? Marketo Segmentation is a feature that lets you organize customers or leads into groups sharing similar characteristics, such as geography, engagement, behavior, or firmographic attributes. You can create up to 20 segmentations in Marketo.

Segmentation is evaluated dynamically, meaning that as data about your customers changes, so will their potential membership in a Segmentation. Each Segmentation is divided into Segments, and members can only belong to a single Segment, preventing overlap and confusing runtime errors.

For example, you may set up a Segmentation for “Industry.” Customers may belong to one of the following Segments: Manufacturing, Construction, Technology, or Education. Marketo evaluates Segments in the order they are provided to ensure that, even if criteria may appear to overlap, customers only belong to the first Segment they qualify for.

Segmentation vs Smart Lists

Both Segmentation and Smart Lists are useful features with some overlap. However, Segmentation is a more permanent way to organize your database. Segmentation is accessible as a field on your lead records, allowing you to reference them in Smart Lists. On the other hand, Smart Lists are useful for quickly assembling a list for email sends, data management operations, or analysis.

Think of it this way: Segmentation is like sorting books in a library by genre, while Smart Lists are like making a custom reading list based on themes or reader requests. Both help organize your efforts, but Segmentation is about broad, ongoing categorizations, whereas Smart Lists serve more immediate, campaign-specific needs.

How Segmentation Works

Segments are created within a Segmentation Object in Marketo, which acts as a container for holding different segments. This is how Segmentation is accessible on lead records and how Marketo can display content dynamically based on the Segment. This is a core component of the feature, as Segmentation unlocks the Dynamic Content feature.

Segments are dynamic and update automatically as lead data changes. This powerful feature ensures that personalization achieved through dynamic content remains relevant and persistent throughout the customer journey.

Segmentation uses the Smart List feature to build out your audiences. While the name of Segmentation, such as one called “Industry,” suggests only a single field used in the qualification criteria, you can set up sophisticated logic using multiple fields for individual segments. This could be used in various ways – for example, if you have multiple properties suggesting a lead’s industry, you may want to set up an “OR” condition to check each field.

Examples of useful Marketo Segmentations

What are some of the most common or useful Segmentations to set up in Marketo? Because of Marketo’s flexibility, you can set up a Segmentation based on any data you have. Let’s look at 10 examples of useful Marketo Segmentations.

Advanced Techniques for Building Marketo Segmentations

While we provide examples of Segmentations, you will ultimately need to experiment to determine the best approach for building them. Let’s explore a few techniques to build the exact Marketo Segmentation your team will find useful.

While we provide examples of Segmentations, you will ultimately need to experiment to determine the best approach for building them. Let’s explore a few techniques to build the exact Marketo Segmentation your team will find useful. Here's what we'll cover:

• Multi-dimensional Segmentations
• Behavioral and event-based Segmentations
• Buyer's journey and lifecycle
• Integrating data from external sources

Multi-dimensional Segmentations

Marketo’s Smart List functionality is embedded in the Segmentation feature—a powerful combination that allows you to create Segments based on advanced logic and query any field available on lead records. You can create Segmentations that combine multiple data points like demographic, behavioral, and transactional information, enabling you to build useful and nuanced Segmentations that directly reflect your marketing objectives.

Example

You can use multi-dimensional segments to target high-value prospects who fit your ideal customer profile. For a B2C use case, you might use income level, product interest, and the most recent interaction to target high-value prospects with a personalized offer. For a B2B example, you could combine industry, company revenue, and the lead's job title to identify qualified buyers.

Behavioral and event-based Segmentations

Behavioral signals sent from key events like website visits, downloads, webinar attendance, and even offline events can be incredibly impactful. Weaving this information into your marketing campaigns can help you capture intent at its highest— for instance, when a lead views a pricing page after attending a webinar. Combining custom fields with Smart Campaigns that trigger when a certain sequence of events takes place is one way to achieve this.

Example

You can probably imagine dozens of uses for a behavioral or event-based Segmentation. Here are a few to get you started:

• Abandoned cart campaigns
• Post-webinar engagement
• Sign up for a free trial
• Demo request
• Pricing page or high-value page visit

Buyer's journey and lifecycle

Marketo’s lifecycle functionality is a great way to track the buyer’s journey and tailor it to your company’s approach. You can further enhance this functionality by tracking the lifecycle with a Segmentation. Using multi-dimensional Segmentation to focus on specific target groups within your lifecycle is a great use case.

Example

You could use lifecycle Segmentation to target specific leads with re-engagement campaigns if they’ve stalled in their lifecycle stage. Combining lifecycle stages with timestamp filters can give you insight into how long a typical lead takes to progress, helping you identify leads that fall outside that typical timeframe.

Integrating data from external sources

Are you integrating your data from external sources with your Segmentation practice? Data appending tools, CRMs, CDPs, and third-party analytics can all help you develop robust Segmentations. Mapping external data fields to Marketo custom fields allows you to pull that information into lead records and use it in a Segmentation.

Example

Tools like 6sense have account-based buying signals that can be associated with individual leads. Use this to develop a Segmentation based on buying signals and share the most qualified leads with your sales team. Alternatively, develop targeted content for those leads using dynamic content.

Using Segmentation and Dynamic Content for Personalization

Marketo Dynamic Content and Segmentation features are closely related. Without predefined Segmentations, Dynamic Content blocks won’t work because Marketo needs to evaluate segmentation rules at runtime to populate content blocks.

Understanding the connection between these two features is important. Segmentations are versatile and can be used for reporting, list building, and personalization. Many Marketo customers have found that to truly personalize their content, they need to create ‘segmentations’ on-the-fly using Velocity Script.

Velocity Script is an advanced method for customizing dynamic content in Marketo. It allows for more granular control over content personalization and goes far beyond standard personalization tokens. With Velocity Script, you can use complex logic and real-time data manipulation to achieve content personalization at scale. For example, with Velocity Script, you can create conditional offers based on multiple conditions, such as past purchase behavior combined with the user persona.

No-Code Solutions for Advanced Segmentation and Personalization

No-code tools like Knak are innovating how users set up Dynamic Content and Segmentations in Marketo. Historically, using Velocity Script to create sophisticated Segmentations for Dynamic Content required developer assistance. With Knak, you can leverage the power of Velocity Script to create Segmentations.

This goes beyond creating single-use Segmentations. Knak allows you to create, save, and reuse Segmentations in the platform. These Segmentations use your data from Marketo but extend the Segmentation functionality beyond Marketo’s feature set. For instance, you can:

• Combine multiple Segmentations together to empower a thoughtful, creative approach to personalization
• Save and share Segmentations with other marketers on your team so they can create dynamic content blocks in emails and landing pages
• Create custom Segmentations that used to be only possible with Velocity script

Marketo’s Segmentation feature combined with Dynamic Content and tools like Knak helps unlock the power of marketing personalization. Segmentation organizes your database into discrete groups, while Dynamic Content allows you to personalize content based on individual preferences.