Content personalization is unarguably one of the current biggest trends happening in content marketing.
Every business that wants to acquire more leads and generate customers need to provide personalized content.
You’ve likely heard about how mega-companies like Amazon and Netflix provide personalized content to their customers.
And you’ve also heard how they’ve made billions of dollars as a result of this. But another question worth answering is: what if your business provides services to other businesses rather than individual consumers?
The short answer is that personalization is just as effective for B2B businesses. In a study by Seismic and Demand Metric, B2B enterprise stakeholders claim they use content marketing to generate leads, support sales teams, improve thought leadership, and generate web traffic.
How effective has B2B content personalization been to these efforts?
Amazingly, 80% of the study participants claim that personalized content has been more effective than non-personalized content.
But what do the B2B buyers say about B2B content personalization? In a Salesforce survey, 83% of B2B buyers say personalization is key to winning their business.
Having said all of this, how do you implement B2B content personalization for your company to acquire more customers?
In this article, discover the 4 essential steps to implementing B2B content personalization for your business.
1. Use the right personalization tools
Without the right tools, it’s impossible to execute B2B content personalization effectively. In fact, according to the aforementioned study by Seismic and Demand Metric, the biggest reason B2B marketers give for not personalizing content is that they lack the technology.
But the truth is, there are now a plethora of tools available that help with personalization. So many that it can get confusing picking the right ones. Here are 4 tools you should consider for each major channel where you should personalize content:
CliClap
CliClap offers a machine learning platform that tailors the experience of each website visitor to drive more quality leads and nurture customer relationships. Their engine learns each visitor’s interests and needs and personalizes their experience by leveraging existing content to offer what’s most relevant to them, at the right time, page, and step. The platform ultimately offers timely and appropriate guidance for visitors for their next-best-action.
Another really cool thing it does is allow you to track how your leads are interacting with PDFs that they download from your website so that you can further personalize their content journeys (and in the process, increase your engagement and improve lead nurturing):
Kenshoo
This tool uses artificial intelligence to determine intent before targeting or retargeting your ads. Thereby, it helps to target users who are likely to convert through your ads. Kenshoo also provides recommendations on your ads and targeting to acquire more customers.
Personyze
With this tool, you can personalize your landing page based on factors such as your visitors’ demographics, source, and behaviour. To make the process as easy as possible, Personyze uses artificial intelligence so that it can display a unique landing page to each visitor, even without making changes manually. This is a great tool to help improve your lead acquisition.
ActiveCampaign
To turn your leads to customers, you need a powerful lead nurturing campaign. With a tool like ActiveCampaign, it’s easy to create email sequences that are triggered automatically by your leads’ behavior. This way, you’re showing personalized email content to each subscriber based on their interests in order to nurture them faster and more effectively:
2. Select a personalization strategy for your campaign
Implementing B2B content personalization is far from being a one-way street. In other words, businesses personalize content based on different criteria.
Most importantly, you should select the best
personalization strategy for your particular buyers. Here are some strategies
you can use for your campaigns:
- Persona-based personalization: If you’re running marketing campaigns, then you should have buyer personas that contain details of your ideal buyers. However, in the B2B buying process, only a few people have the power to decide to purchase your product. Is this person the CEO, CMO, or the CFO? Your buyer persona should capture details of the decision-makers at your target companies. Consequently, it becomes easier to personalize content for these people.
- Stage of the buying process: Your prospects need different types of content at each stage of the buying process. But whether your lead is at the awareness, consideration, or decision stage, they need to feel the pieces of content are relevant to them. This will pull them further down into your sales funnel and towards the purchase.
- Industry segment: Even for the same product, needs across industries might differ. This means the features of your product important to leads in manufacturing might be different from those in software. With personalization, prospects from different industries will see how your product can meet their unique needs.
- Lead-specific personalization: In cases where a single deal might be worth tens of thousands of dollars, you can personalize your content to specific leads at these companies. Your content will show each lead how your service can solve their problems. This takes more time and research but is more effective.
3. Consider marketing channels for personalization
There are many marketing channels where you’ll find personalization highly effective in boosting results. Having said this, you don’t have to restrict personalization to a single channel.
In fact, you should apply personalization to all possible marketing channels. This way, you can compound the positive effects and increase customer acquisition.
What are common channels to apply personalization?
- Your website: To put it simply, your website is the hub of your marketing activities. Whether you’re running Google PPC ads or LinkedIn ads, you want to drive prospects to your website and once there, you want to convert them into customers. For a visitor, you can personalize your content according to their referral source, previous interactions with your brand, location, user behavior on your site, etc.
- Digital advertising: To acquire customers quickly, you need to advertise on the right advertising platforms. But more importantly, you need to deliver your ads to the right people and with the right content. Using details from your buyer persona, advertising platforms allow you to target your ideal audience. Furthermore, you need to create ads personalized to your audience.
- Landing pages: These pages help to capture leads that you can convert to customers down the line. Now, the main way to convince a prospect to submit their details is through your landing page content. Your landing page offer has to resonate with your visitors to convince them to leave their details. Here’s a personalized landing page for Airbnb hosts according to their location.
- Email: This is one of the best channels to nurture your leads. With email marketing, it’s more effective to pull prospects further down your sales funnel until they become customers. However, to achieve that, you have to personalize emails to each prospect based on their interests. Here’s an example from The Expert Institute which sends personalized emails to subscribers based on their interest levels. This led to a 20% click-through rate for the emails and a 200% increase in conversions.
Personalization helps to improve these marketing channels’ effectiveness and you should consider them for your personalization strategy.
4. Measure personalization results and keep improving your strategy
Implementing B2B content personalization is good – but the job is not done yet.
Once you’ve set up personalization techniques, you need to track the results of your efforts to see its effects on customer acquisition. Some important metrics to track include:
- Changes in website traffic
- Changes in landing page traffic
- Changes in the number of acquired leads by channel
- Changes in the number of qualified leads by channel
- Changes in traffic on important pages
- Changes in the number of acquired customers
Luckily, some of the tools that deliver customized B2B content will provide metrics on your performance. Another option is to use a popular tool like Google Analytics.
By tracking these metrics, you can determine how effective B2B content personalization has been on customer acquisition.
Furthermore, these metrics help to improve your strategy for future B2B marketing campaigns.
Conclusion: B2B content personalization
Even though B2B content personalization is still improving in its first stages, it’s one of the biggest marketing trends and deservedly so. As a B2B company, using personalization will give you an edge over your competitors, in terms of customer acquisition and lead nurturing, so it’s definitely worth implementing sooner rather than later.
To get started, simply use the 4-point process in this guide and begin implementing B2B content personalization today on all of your marketing channels.
