In B2C marketing, personalization has always been an integral part. It has been employed by many leading brands like Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon to boost revenue and keep consumers engaged.
However, when it comes to the B2B landscape, personalization is a little abstract. It’s something that most talk about however only a few have managed to fully exploit it or even tried. This could be because brands often find it difficult to combine strategy, technology, and data in meaningful ways.
If your marketing campaigns are generic and bland, you might miss out on some great opportunities. Well, not anymore!
In this article, we’ll cover three examples of B2B Marketing Personalization strategies in action and how it helps businesses reap big success.
But let’s first understand what personalized B2B marketing is all about…
Understanding What Personalized B2B Marketing Means
Most marketers know that appealing to the consumers in a straightforward, engaging, and relevant manner is the most effective way to trigger demand.
Nevertheless, in B2B marketing, your buyer isn’t an average customer, rather you’re promoting your services or products to top-level decision-makers with complex priorities & responsibilities.
You might wonder personalized marketing is necessary or plausible for a B2B audience. Do they even want personalization?
Well, as per Salesforce’s recent findings, the answer is yes: approximately 75 percent of business buyers want their vendors to personalize interactions as per their needs.
This offers an incredible opportunity to build relationships with your prospects before the sales proceedings even starts. With the right technology on board (typically marketing automation tool + content management), you’ll be able to achieve this by offering targeted content as well as a positive, interactive experience.
When you build these early relationships, the chances of generating quality leads and converting them increases. This is one of the main priorities of every b2b marketer.
Source: https://blog.zoominfo.com/personalized-marketing-quotes/
So, how and what do you personalize in your B2B marketing campaigns? The following examples of three B2B marketing personalization tactics in action will help you understand better:
1. Email Personalization & Expert Institute
If you aren’t delivering relevant emails to your subscribers, your email marketing efforts will do you no good.
In fact, a recent B2B marketing report found that 53.2% of respondents received irrelevant email content regularly. Here’s an example of a B2B organization that utilized personalized email marketing to boost conversions.
We’re talking about Expert Institute, which is a legal services company for investment firms. Michael Morgenstern, the company’s marketing VP, says his organization is heavy on content and digital marketing tactic, which has assisted them in bridging the “gap between the legal space and technology.”
After looking at other B2B firms that achieve personalized communication, EI decided to try personalization in email campaigns as well.
To make it more effective, they started by updating their database (which is a vital step for any personalized marketing) to make sure every first name was accurate.
“The objective obviously is to encourage more engagement, to encourage more revenue, and to boost our business growth,” said Morgenstern.
Beyond the use of first names, they went on to segment their email list based on different levels of engagement. To the subscribers that didn’t engage much, EI offered free materials like white papers and ebooks. As for the ones that engaged more, they received emails with links to CTAs and blog posts. The most engaged subscribers, on the other hand, received email content or special offers on Expert Institute’s services.
After a series of testing and improving, the company reported some incredible results, which include:
- 20% CTR
- 60% email open rate &
- 200% increase in conversions
2. Personalized Content Recommendations and Evergage
Source: Neilpatel.com
One of the marketing tragedies is dedicating a huge amount of effort and time to produce good content only to find their target audiences ignoring it. Such a situation is enough to discourage even the most experienced advertising pro. A great way to avoid this dreadful tragedy is to leverage personalization tactics to make sure your content is sent to those who are actually interested in it.
And that’s exactly what Evergage, a B2B company that produces numerous content geared towards prospects at different stages of the sales funnel, did. The company was able to solve this problem by providing its website visitors with one on one content recommendations. This approach meant every visitor saw a unique piece of content based on their interests, past purchases/downloads, and history.
The marketers were able to do this by incorporating an algorithmic engine into the website navigation, which helped in making recommendations through the resource page. This is an excellent example of a B2B organization that harnessed the power of the “Amazon effect” in contemporary commerce, where all recommendations are personalized.
3. CSC and Personalization via ABM
ABM is about tailoring your campaigns to specific targets that you pick ahead of time. It’s becoming a very popular strategy as lead gen managers align their marketing initiatives with revenue. Since account-based marketing requires a unique approach and a narrow focus for every account, it’s an excellent example of B2B marketing personalization.
Computer Sciences Corporation is an organization that offers IT infrastructure solutions to customers worldwide. After realizing the benefits of combining ABM and personalization, the company used a platform known as Demandbase to better target their prospects.
CSC built marketing campaigns to interact with named accounts. They used reverse-IP lookup for targeting (and retargeting) specific businesses with custom ads and content across different channels at optimum times. In essence, regardless of where the target audience was, CSC was successful in enveloping those prospects with the right message at the most appropriate time.
With the help of this personalization strategy, CSC was able to target 245 companies and 105 of those organizations helped in boosting their CTRs and website visits. They also experienced an increase in views by 58%, allowing them to move target prospects further through the funnel.
Final Say
True B2B personalization requires you to go above and beyond to understand the priorities of each buyer and adding value to their purchasing journey. For that, you’ll need powerful technology, good content, accurate data, and the willingness to experiment.
After all, if there’s one key takeaway from these B2B marketing personalization examples, it’s to never be afraid of experimenting and getting creative with your marketing efforts.
Make use of all available AI platforms and technology at your disposal and collect the necessary data to create and deliver personalized messages to your target audience.