In today's fast-paced digital landscape, high demand for personalized experiences has become the norm. Customers are living in a world where they are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information and choices. As a result, they are giving preference to more personalized experiences from the brands they interact with.
If you are a B2B company, you can no longer afford to treat your customers as a homogeneous group. A recent study by Salesforce found that 72% of B2B buyers expect personalized experiences similar to what they receive as consumers. In this post, we'll explore different ways to personalize your B2B marketing strategies and provide you with tips and best practices to help you master the art of personalization in your marketing efforts.
Let’s start by exploring a few practical ways you can personalize a customer’s experience with your brand.
Emails
Starting off with the basics, you can send different versions of an email to different groups. Each one can have messaging, product promotions, or links to content that would be especially relevant to that particular audience even if the gist of the overall message is basically the same.
Taking it a step further, even within the same email, you can have subject lines, content, and images display differently for different people. You can do this by dynamically inserting content just for recipients who meet certain criteria. For example, a group of digital-first prospects who receive your email could get a case study that shows heavy use of technology, while a group that’s less technologically engaged gets the same email but is shown a case study with more of a hands-on approach.
Landing Pages
You may not think of a website as a customizable experience, but it is. You can create different versions of your landing pages, keep them invisible to web crawlers and search engines, and send groups of people there only from ads designed to attract the specific audience that would enjoy the content on that version of the page. For instance, if you are targeting a group of prospects interested in cloud-based solutions, you can create a landing page with content specific to that topic. You could create a whole different landing page for prospects who are interested in data management, and send them there with those ads.
Social
Social media is harder to customize because your content is discoverable on your profile by anyone who visits there, but you can personalize the content for the channel at least. For example, LinkedIn is great for longer, more thought-out pieces, and links to industry thought leadership. Facebook is ideal for interactive content like quizzes and sharables. Instagram is for a visually-driven audience looking for escape. Twitter is perfect for quippy remarks. And TikTok is great for building on conversations happening in the algorithm in which you’d like to appear. Tailoring your social media content so it’s appropriate for the channel you’re posting in will, in a sense, customize it for the audiences likely to find you there.
Interactions with your brand
Any time anyone interacts with a touch point from your business, it should complement (and sometimes even directly reference) their other recent interactions. A call from sales, for example, should ask a customer how they’re doing if they’ve recently reached out to customer service for support. Along the same lines, a support representative that’s contacted should recognize and acknowledge it if the customer has called before.
Sure, personalization can be more work than blanket marketing tactics that put everyone in the same bucket, but it’s so much more impactful for business. Here’s the proof:
80% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences according to Epsilon.
The vast majority of marketers, 97%, report improvement in business results due to Personalization according to Salesforce.
70% of companies that use advanced personalization have already earned 200% ROI or more from it according to a study by KO Marketing.
Personalization is the baseline expectation now, and it’s essential to meet it. By creating personalized experiences, you can improve customer satisfaction and boost ROI. If you need help injecting personalized experiences into your marketing content but aren’t sure where to start, we can help.