At Blue Tortoise, we have considerable experience in helping our clients to define the clusters or segments that they need to target in their marketing campaigns.

For some clients, this support is for individual campaigns. For many, we help to construct data strategy plans that support longer term campaign plans.

Our starting point is to define the profile of the accounts or organisations that are to be targeted. Our goal here is to create real-world definitions of the target account clusters and generate terms we can use to order data from third-party data vendors. To do this, we need to usually create parameters of geography, industry sector, or account firmographics - annual revenue, employee numbers at the company or at the site.

We do this either by taking the client's definitions, or by consulting with the client to generate the definitions.

Where we help a client to generate the definitions, we can use appropriate statistical techniques such as CHAID analysis or Latent Class Analysis to establish the highest margin or highest revenue customers, and from this analysis construct profiles of organisations to target.

This is a similar approach we use for building contact profiles.

The client receives a report showing our recommendations, estimates of overlap with the client's current data, robust estimates of the number of organisations in the segments (which we obtain from the primary data provider), and algorithmic estimates of the contact numbers.

In the report, we construct visualisation that reflects the client's business need. So for example, territory planning heat maps, account stratification, CHAID segment summaries.