What's the best way to segment your customers to write messaging that resonates with them?

Be clear on your target and start there. If you’re a marketplace, force primary and secondary segments. And if you’ve got multiple business lines and segments with unique pain points, align on a clear hierarchy and where in your funnel you can speak to different audiences. I’d say the fewer segments the better. It leads to less confusion internally and externally.

As you do research on your segmentation, in addition to unique needs and pain points, look for commonalities. That will help ensure that you have overarching messaging that resonates with most and then you can tailor that core message per segment.

The format that has worked for us to-date is segmenting users by functional roles / buyer personas and use cases. For example - Let’s say your product caters to both HR and IT - you want distinct messages for HR and for IT - because the challenges HR faces are likely very different than what IT cares about. But to take this a step further, even within HR itself, you might have a product that solves for either recruiting, or onboarding or employee engagement (or all) - Isolate the top use cases and develop messaging around that specifically. The key is get specific!

At the end of the day, put yourself in your customers’ shoes - what will help close that deal is messaging that is tailored to their immediate challenge, and shows them the ideal world that only exists with your product/solution!

I like to group customers in a couple different ways, primarily by the struggle or trigger that led them to "hire" the product (leaning on Jobs-to-be-Done research to identify these). 

I will then segment based on where they are (on the path to solving their pain) in their relationship with the product ie. evaluation, activation, engagement. 

Lastly, I'll use something like NPS or engagement scores to identify which customers might need extra love or a nudge.

It can get complicated very quickly, I agree with Anjali. So starting with a very simple experiment, one at a time will make it less overwhelming to manage and measure. 

Hope that helps! 

Georgiana is spot on regarding segmentation by problem. However, from there, the most important thing to do is to segment by stakeholder. How does each stakeholder experience that problem, and what incentives are they, as individuals, responding to? As a (huge) bonus, if you complete this and do it right, you're well on your way to having buyer personas, too.