The top-performing marketing campaigns don’t just send an offer out into the world, hoping to find the right audience. They use in-depth data, thoughtful strategy, and targeted segmentation to reach the right person with the right message at the right time. But plenty of marketers still overlook opportunities to use advanced segmentation to unlock deeper insights and send their best campaigns yet.
Short links and QR Codes are powerful marketing tools on their own. But when you pair them with segmentation, your enterprise can make every campaign more personalized and effective. Bitly’s digital tools are built for enterprise needs, delivering laser-focused segmentation via trusted touchpoints.
If you’re ready to go beyond surface-level tracking to targeted, effective campaigns, this practical guide is for you. Learn what advanced segmentation looks like across digital tools and gain marketing strategies you can implement today.
Note: The brands and examples discussed below were found during our online research for this article.
Advanced segmentation + digital connections
Marketing segmentation divides your entire audience into smaller subsets based on characteristics like demographics, previous purchases, or interests. After identifying these subsets, marketers can send the right email or SMS campaigns to the right segment or better target paid search or social ads.
Bitly Analytics informs segmentation by collecting data on your audience, from their location and device type to high-engagement campaign types. Every time someone clicks a Bitly link or scans a QR Code from their smartphone, Bitly collects these insights to aid segmentation for future campaign creation or optimization of current campaigns.
For even more advanced segmentation, introduce UTM parameters, which are are small bits of code that reveal the origins of your web traffic. In tools like Google Analytics, UTM parameters let you review traffic by source, medium, or campaign. Turn UTM-enabled links into branded Bitly short links or link them to QR Codes to create user-friendly touchpoints and to collect in-depth metadata that fuels segmentation.
When you use Bitly’s suite of tools, you can unify click and scan data across channels to review engagement by audience segment. Learn exactly which channels and messaging drive pipeline and revenue for a clearer picture of ROI and performance, whether you’re measuring affiliate links, sending email campaigns, or driving social engagement.
You can also integrate Bitly with other marketing platforms like your CRM to enrich data and enhance your segmentation strategy. As these adaptable digital tools collect real-time insights, you can create more detailed audience segments for higher-performing campaigns.
Key segmentation strategies with short links
Short link data gives you a direct line to see how consumers interact with your campaigns, helping you identify the right segments and customize your campaigns to each of those unique audiences. Here are a few ways to approach advanced segmentation using short links.
By channel and campaign
Across digital channels, a short link is your best friend as a branded, trusted touchpoint for your audience to take action. Review click data to understand audience engagement by channel. Compare conversions across paid versus organic social, analyze email marketing audiences to improve targeting and messaging, and track the ROI of your influencer campaigns. Short link data lets you measure existing segments and make decisions about who you should target in the future.
Plus, in Bitly Analytics, branded short links keep campaigns organized and trackable. Use campaign tags to group related campaigns or sort them by medium or channel for a quick overview of which campaigns are driving clicks and sales within a category and which strategies to keep investing in.
By geography
The best marketing campaigns meet your audience right where they are—quite literally. Geographic data for marketing, including location-based click data, shows you where your campaigns are getting the most engagement so you can build high-converting geographic segments. If you notice a certain city or region often clicks your campaigns, create targeted local campaigns for those areas or send a more personal product offering that connects with them.
By audience or account type
Enterprises (especially in the B2B space) often sell to entire buying committees over a period of weeks, months, or longer, all of which calls for a different segmentation approach. B2B marketers can segment audiences by customer persona, buyer stage, or account tier and send targeted campaigns with dedicated short links to a custom landing page or offer. Click data then reveals each audience’s engagement and conversion rate. Create more complex workflows as well, like setting up CRM enrichment each time a potential buyer clicks or sales alerts to trigger a follow-up outreach.
How QR Codes support segmentation
QR Codes transform physical and in-person marketing touchpoints into lasting digital interactions. Some of these channels used to be virtually impossible to measure or track, but QR Codes now offer rich attribution data across billboards, direct mail, and more—and they help marketers fine-tune their segmentation in the process. Here’s how.
Dynamic QR Codes for agility
Dynamic QR Codes’ superpower is the ability to change destinations even after the Code is created or printed; this is an invaluable asset for segmented campaigns. It means you can start campaigns with multiple QR Codes that go to different destinations based on location or messaging (A/B testing for the win!). Then, you can collect data from each audience and update the lower-performing or lower-converting landing page to a more targeted destination for a specific segment.
Bitly’s dynamic QR Codes track every scan and provide data on device types, locations, and time scanned, so you get a wealth of information to create campaigns with maximum agility and flexibility.
Campaign-based segmentation
If your brand sells multiple SKUs, your different audience segments almost certainly buy different products. QR Codes let you segment buyers by their typical purchase behaviors. Share separate codes across your product packaging, and use unique codes for each of your events, print ads, or out-of-home (OOH) advertising.
You can also target the destinations to send audiences to the right digital journeys. Point them to download your digital app from a coupon for online ordering, or a landing page for a product preview from an eye-catching billboard, which you can segment by location.
Cross-channel journeys
The digital tools you use together form a powerful team that brings in the insights you need to understand and segment your audience. When you use Bitly links and QR Codes in tandem, you can build a unified view of engagement. Review where customers arrive on your digital doorstep from other websites or media platforms, and see which in-person experiences turn them into browsers, subscribers, and buyers.
All of this data comes together to paint a picture of your typical (and best) customers’ journey and all the channels they interact with before they buy. For instance, you can integrate Bitly Analytics with Salesforce to turn QR Code scan data into better lead scoring models and more effective sales outreach based on conversion rates and the creation of micro-segments. Segment your audience to create detailed accounts of their journeys to reach them every step of the way.
How 4 industries can apply segmentation
Advanced segmentation adds nuance to any marketing campaign. No matter your niche, QR Codes and short links can help you measure your marketing efforts and uncover the right subsets of your audience to reach with your latest and greatest offering. Here are just a few examples of industries that benefit from advanced segmentation with Bitly tools and how:
- Retail and ecommerce: Reach out to new customers and longtime loyal buyers by segmenting your outreach by channel. Track digital ad performance with a unique short link for each campaign and retarget first-time customers or cart abandoners. Share a QR Code on each package with a link to an offer just for them.
- Events: Scans and clicks offer a world of data about your event registrants and attendees, showing you where your marketing is performing best and which parts of the event are drawing most attention. To segment your audience by registration source, review link clicks in Bitly Analytics and sort by referrer. Place in-venue QR Codes to capture interest in specific offers, sessions, or vendors.
- Healthcare and other regulated industries: In industries that handle highly protected information, like healthcare and cybersecurity, campaign targeting is still critical. But marketers also need utmost confidence that they can keep consumer data safe and protected. With Bitly’s SOC 2 compliance and documented secure data handling, you can rest assured that data will be handled with care—and your customers can click or scan with confidence.
- Education and EdTech: What content do your students engage with, and which resources lead them to take action? Segment learners by course with dedicated short links to syllabi or course registration, and provide QR Codes to capture their engagement inside the classroom and out.
Across industries, these trackable digital tools are the key ingredient to make the most of your next campaign. Analyze the data they capture to gain meaningful insights about how to categorize your audience as a whole—and customize your campaigns to reach them.
4 best practices for enterprise teams
Once you’ve identified the right audience segments by location, demographic, or previous purchases (or all of the above), use these four best practices to collect data, drive digital connections, and refine your segmentation.
1. Always use branded short links
Branded short links are an essential tool to connect and convince any audience segment to take action. Rather than a generic link with a random string of characters, create short URLs using your familiar domain and a descriptive back-half. Branded URLs encourage more clicks in the moment and reinforce long-term customer trust. In Bitly Analytics, branded domains keep your segmentation clean by showing how specific audiences engaged and organizing clickthrough data by campaign.
2. Pair UTMs with advanced analytics
UTM parameters can make or break link-based segmentation—but Improvado research found that companies don’t use UTM markup in over 30% of their campaigns. Make these parameters a universal best practice by including them in every short link you send. Decide which parameters to include in long URLs (before shortening and tracking links with a tool like Bitly), document which campaign tags to use internally and when, and align UTM usage across campaigns for clear, clean attribution. With these UTM processes in place, you can pull real-time marketing metrics from Bitly Analytics to your other business intelligence tools to review audience responses by channel or campaign.
3. Create Dynamic QR Codes
Whenever possible, create Dynamic QR Codes that you can update and redirect after publishing or printing your marketing materials. Update campaigns to drive certain audiences to the right landing page for their interests, or run geographic A/B testing, then change the destination to the higher-converting offer. As you collect more data from and about your audience segments, update your QR Code destination to better align with their needs and ensure every scan takes them to a page that will drive action.
4. Prioritize governance and compliance
To build and keep customer trust, enterprises need to prioritize audience data protection and privacy. Lean on role-based permissions to ensure the right people have access to customer data in. Monitor your tools for anomalies or signs of access by threat actors, and work with your security team to keep their information safe. Bitly complies with SOC 2 standards, so you can rest easy knowing your digital tools are doing their part to meet the high bar for enterprise IT and data security.
A smarter approach to segmentation with Bitly
Advanced segmentation with digital tools isn’t just about tracking clicks and scans. It’s about understanding audiences, noticing what sparks attention, and delivering what individuals want and need from your brand. Done well, segmentation enables attribution, personalization, and ROI measurement.
Bitly short links and QR Codes give enterprises the tools and data to create detailed segments and refine campaigns. Enrich individual and account profiles in your CRM with each interaction, track campaign performance with cross-channel attribution, and drive omnichannel engagement from events, store shelves, and physical ads.
Basic QR Codes and short link tools provide basic functionality—Bitly’s suite of solutions is anything but basic. The Connections Platform offers an undeniable enterprise advantage with digital marketing staples, advanced analytics, and integrations with top BI solutions, plus verified security and compliance.
Explore our tiers or connect with our team to build a custom plan that’s right for your team.
