In the mass of emails, content, video, and information that’s floating around, it’s no wonder so much B2B marketing content gets ignored. Without a compelling reason for a B2B buyer to engage with a message that’s relative to them, most content falls flat.
Personalization creates a way for you to cut through the clutter and grab a buyer’s attention. It’s not just a marketing gimmick either. More than three-quarters of buyers say they want and expect a personalized experience from marketers, according to Demand Gen Buyer Behavior Study. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, buyers are busy people and don’t want to waste their time with irrelevant content.
Personalization ensures the content is relevant. The right marketing automation and buyer experience platform can produce personalization at scale.
Why Is Personalization So Important?
Generic emails and outreach are quickly deleted or ignored. Personalized content, however, stimulates action triggers in our brain. In fact, researchers at UC Berkeley found that information acts on dopamine much in the same way as money or food — meaning relevant content that feels personalized to our wants and needs can stimulate the reward center of the brain. It makes us feel like someone recognizes our challenges and concerns, and might be able to help. In content marketing, this information is gold when it comes to connecting with your audience.
This is one reason why social media has taken hold and why people check it multiple times a day. Much of the content is personally relevant, which can create a constant loop of dopamine release. We’ll save the argument about why that’s not necessarily a good thing for another day, but understanding how it works helps you understand why personalization is so important to your marketing efforts.
Simply put, personalization triggers a positive reaction and improves engagement significantly.
It also helps create relationships and trust. When B2B buyers come to believe you understand their problems, it helps showcase your position as an industry leader. This also helps mitigate the inherent risk in B2B transactions: spending money on a solution that doesn’t work and potentially putting a buyer’s reputation on the line. When a B2B buyer trusts a B2B seller, the risk is low, and the sales cycle is accelerated.
However, personalization goes far beyond putting someone’s name in the subject line. Effective personalization is designed to deliver the right piece of content to the right person at the exact stage of the buying journey where it will have maximum impact. Delivering this 1:1 experience that best fits a specific B2B buyer’s needs is the core philosophy behind account-based marketing (ABM).
Folloze leverages intent data to segment target audiences at each stage of the buying journey, applying the 1:1 personalization strategy for interactions that best fit the individual account’s interests. This enables their marketers to improve the effectiveness of their outreach, improving engagement rates as well as overall ABM campaign ROI.
Digital marketers know the power of personalization. In a 2021 survey in partnership with the Demand Gen Report, 99% of marketers we surveyed said personalized content and messaging played a pivotal role in the success of B2B sales and marketing.
So, what does it take to develop personalized content as part of your marketing campaign to heighten the customer experience?
Creating the Personalized Experience: A Blueprint for Building and Scaling Personalization
Whether it’s a blog, email marketing campaign, website content, a social media post, or digital marketing, you need a personalized experience, tailored to the user experience. Here are some of the key steps to building and scaling your personalization engine.
Account Research
The first step is identifying the potential customer pool and finding commonalities among high-value customers. Examining the data that you already have will give you a pretty good picture of the types of customers you want. From there, you can use these insights to create buyer personas to help craft content and ideal customer profiles (ICP) for targeting.
Collecting personal information about business owners and high-value prospects helps you refine your target audience. You can then target in various ways, including:
- Segmenting of industry verticals
- Buyer journey stages
- Accounts
- Individual leads
- Specific buyer personas and profiles
A well-executed ABM strategy enables you to target groups of buyers with personalized marketing content (one to a few) or leverage true 1:1 personalization for high-value accounts. Segmenting these accounts with different content, email personalization, web personalization, and product recommendations, for example, makes your content marketing work harder and more effectively. Website pages with dynamic content can provide a seamless journey across different audience segments to deliver a consistent unique experience.
Account research should be conducted jointly by sales and marketing. Sales and marketing teams need to align early in the process to ensure consistency. Companies with tightly aligned marketing sales teams simply perform better. Alignment has been shown to create 38% higher sales win rates and 36% higher retention rates. When teams align on goals and create the marketing content that supports sales, leads are 67% more likely to convert.
Personalized Messaging
To deliver relevant, personalized content across the buyer journey, your content marketing strategy must include a deep analysis of the journey. You then need to create the marketing materials that you will use to deliver content personalization at each stage.
Your marketing strategy must include robust content development so that you have the relevant content you need to engage prospects and tailor to their different needs. This doesn’t mean you need to create every piece of content from scratch. That would be very inefficient. The simplest way is to create content ahead of time that speaks to the needs and pain points you’ve identified through creating your buyer personas and ICPs.
This material can then be delivered at the right time. The right marketing automation and marketing tools can personalize the buyer's journey. B2B companies can include first-party and third-party behavioral data and intent data to refine content delivery. AI and machine learning within the automation platform can deliver the content in near real-time to accelerate engagement and optimize performance.
Your buyer experience platform can also gauge engagement and look for triggers and actions that indicate buyer behavior. From content consumption, engagement levels, and buying signals, this data is then used to serve the next best-fit piece of content or email marketing designed to improve the conversion rate.
This approach creates a custom path across touchpoints in the buyer journey whether they are a new lead or repeat customer.
Personalized Landing Pages and Microsites
Landing pages and microsites are important parts of creating a seamless buyer journey.
Landing pages are stand-alone pages to attract a website visitor and achieve a specific goal, such as providing an email in exchange for content, registering for a webinar, or signing up for a free trial. Microsites provide a more immersive experience for target audiences, allowing them to explore specific topics in greater depth.
Both landing pages and microsites are valuable tools to generate leads, increase demand generation, and foster further engagement. Using dynamic content, you can create an endless number of personalized landing pages and microsites to deliver relevant content.
To learn how to personalize with Folloze, visit Personalization 101.
Scale Your Personalized Marketing
If you had only one account to focus on, it would be easy to craft personalized content. However, that doesn’t provide the scale you need for sustainable growth. Companies are targeting large numbers of prospects — all in various stages of the buying journey. The only way to effectively actuate personalization at scale is marketing automation for sales orchestration.
An effective personalized B2B marketing Platform transforms ABM playbooks by delivering the customized and micro-targeted experience buyers need to engage. By orchestrating the entire end-to-end process, you can deliver personalized campaigns at scale and generate the real-time insights you need to drive demand and conversions. This helps you build a solid pipeline and track metrics at every touchpoint. At each interaction, the platform recommends the next steps so that the sales team can quickly act and turn engagement into revenue.
This closed-loop data monitors engagement delivers the next right action and creates a guided sales process designed for optimization. The Folloze platform can provide personalization in various ways, including content, product recommendations, images, automated account tailoring, and individual account targeting.
Case Study: Ring Central
Ring Central partnered with Folloze to put these strategies into practice. In the first six months, they used personalization to engage 50 accounts, leading to 8.5 hours of content consumption to drive demand.
Executive engagement grew as well. Thanks to the ability to track every touchpoint, Ring Central was able to see that more than 25 executives spent more than three minutes each with content. From this process, they were able to generate a meeting with the Chief Technical Officer of one of the biggest banks in the world. They were also able to build internal champions inside the organization to help drive the sales side.
Not only did this create greater and targeted opportunities, but it also instilled confidence in the sales team that the program was key for developing accounts.
The Folloze Buyer Experience Platform
The Folloze Buyer Experience Platform lets you create rich, personalized content in minutes without any coding. With Folloze, you can customize content and creative in real-time with the click of a button. You can deploy campaigns across multiple marketing channels (email, social, websites, ads, sales engagement tools), and empower your sales team with the content they need to drive sales.
Request a demo today and see why Folloze is the simplest way to build your sales pipeline, increase closing rates, and drive revenue.
