A common mistake: designing your WordPress experience based on someone’s job title, company size, or industry.
It feels intuitive—but it’s often misleading. As often as not, it’s what vendors offering personalization are focused on, but that’s misleading too.
My ground rule is that you should never define a segment unless someone in the segment is trying to solve a different problem or will potentially buy for another reason, compared to people in other segments. There are exceptions to this, perhaps the most obvious being that prospects in different countries may be expecting their experience to conform to local norms.
Two users you might be tempted to group in the same “segment” can have completely different needs–that’s what matters. One may be trying to DIY a project; another might be an agency looking for resale value. One might prioritize speed, another precision. Their goals—not their labels—should drive how your site behaves.
This leaves a huge question wide open: how do you know their goals?
One way that, weirdly, isn’t immediately obvious for most people, is that you can just ask them. One thing that RightMessage makes it easy to do is add a popup on your site that asks what you’d like to get out of this current website visit. That’s the right idea. And they’ve got a great page on lots of ways you can get to a meaningful intent for the present visit (or for more useful segmentation).
Smart WordPress experiences don’t rely on categories. They rely on signals: what someone clicked, what they searched, what they skipped.
Instead of grouping users by what they look like, try grouping them by what they’re trying to do.
Design follows behavior.