We’ve written several articles recently about account-based marketing and personalization, from the basics to how you can apply it to your website, digital ads, and more. But it’s important to mention that personalization matters in B2B now more than ever.
Research shows that personalization:
- Enhances the buying and brand experience
- Amplifies relevance to existing customers
- Increases revenue team impact and efficiency
Aside from its benefits, customers expect personalized interaction: 71% of them, in fact, and three-quarters of customers get frustrated when their expectations aren’t met.
Personalization is a must-have for organizations that wish to stay competitive, too. Companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue than the average.
What does all this mean?
Once strongly associated with B2C customer experience, personalization is now the norm for B2B companies, too. Those that embrace personalization stand to benefit, and those that don’t are putting themselves at risk.
Whether you’re ready to start personalization or double down on your current efforts, here are some best practices you can begin today to meet customer expectations.
Nailing the Messaging
There are multiple channels you can apply personalization to. But before you do any of that, you’ll need to know who your customers are, and what kind of messaging will resonate best with them. For this, B2B companies need a customer data platform (CDP).
CDPs house all of the interactions you have with your prospects and customers, including:
- Web pages they visit
- Webinars they attend
- Content they download
- Calls they have with your sales team
- And more
AI-powered CDPs have even more to offer, and can give you insight into:
- What your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like
- Accounts you might not know about that are in-market and ready to buy
- The websites, keywords, and topics your buyers research most
- Interest in, or engagement with, competitors
- The signals your buyers give off when they’re ready to buy
This data, compiled from a variety of sources, is critical for providing consistent, relevant messaging across ads, web content, email outreach, and other channels.
Attempting personalization based on guesswork or stale data leads to personalization that misses the mark and kills deals. But there’s no need for guesswork when you create personalized campaigns and content geared for specific buyer personas, pain points, stages of the buying journey, competitive plays, and other topics that are proven by data to be relevant to your audience.
Bespoke Website Content
Armed with the information above, you can now craft personalized website content. Website personalization involves creating dynamic experiences in which images, content, or links are customized to an individual site visitor’s interests or needs. Some possibilities include:
- Presenting different homepage or landing-page “welcome” messages for different audiences or campaigns
- Displaying images that might resonate better with specific industries or personas
- Serving up a collection of content highly relevant to a particular stage in the buyer’s journey
This bespoke experience — especially when delivered at the right time in the buying journey — shows customers that your organization understands their industry, has fluency in their business concerns, and can address their unique pain points.
This trust positively influences buyers, especially when it comes time to make a buying decision. They’re also more likely to adopt new features or solutions if they’re already a customer.
Dynamic Content Hubs
Personalizing a website experience can also extend to crafting content hubs. Content hubs are landing pages that dynamically curate selections of videos, blog posts, case studies, downloadable content, and more, with topics determined by persona, industry, or other segments.
These fast-track your customers to information they’re likely most interested in, based on the data in their CDP profile. Directing them to relevant educational content early in the buying journey helps them make more informed purchasing decisions, and might even accelerate the time it takes to close deals.
Smart Chatbots
Another personalized website touchpoint are chatbots — specifically ones that are AI-powered. (Why AI-powered? Other types of chatbots offer customers a limited range of selections and require them to do a lot of clicking to get the answers they’re looking for.)
An AI-powered chatbot can serve as a much smarter concierge by basing interactions off what it knows about your customers from their CDP profiles. Right away, customers feel understood, and are quickly directed toward the solutions they need.
AI-Powered Emails
Generic mass sales and marketing emails are often a waste of time to craft and send, because they almost always end up in spam folders, unread, or deleted. This is why personalized email outreach is so important for B2B. For that, you need a compelling subject line to get customers to open them, and relevant, revelatory content to keep them reading.
To do it at scale, you’ll need an AI-powered tool that helps you send emails with subject lines and content tailored to the recipient. Extra-smart email tools also use automation to get conversations going, follow up with customers looking for specific information, and act as an assistant for other types of personalized email outreach.
Conclusion
Armed with the right tools, like a CDP and personalization platforms, B2B companies can offer buyers and customers the relevant, personalized experiences they expect.
Personalization gives B2B companies a competitive advantage not by only meeting customer expectations, but also by demonstrating a commitment to understanding and addressing their specific needs. This improved brand experience builds customer trust and loyalty, which can result in higher conversion rates as well as higher customer satisfaction and retention.
6sense is an AI-powered revenue platform with an embedded CDP, as well as a robust offering of digital marketing tools. Book a demo to learn more about how we can help you take your online experience further with personalization of your website, emails, and other channels.
