Brand personalization is more important than ever before.
Why? Personalization has become an important ingredient for B2B brands looking to generate engagement with prospective buyers and see a return on investment (ROI) over the long term.
Getting the message right and fine-tuning the smaller components will allow brands to establish a presence in an untapped market. This will help to utilize vital touch points through which brands can engage with existing and prospective clients.
What Is Personalization In Marketing In 2024?
Digital transformation across multiple facets of the highly technological global economy has enabled brands to bring people closer and foster more meaningful connections. Driven by smart-tools and artificial technology, brands can build a future-proof model that allows them to strategically connect with consumers more accurately through personalized messages.
Technology, and perhaps more importantly, social media in the scope of personalized B2B marketing can help to power more meaningful connections. Around 78 percent of consumers already feel that brands should use social media to help them connect, according to research by SproutSocial.
Targeted content and messages help people feel more connected with one another, and with brands. Social media allows brands to become more visual through content curation, and leveraging consumer data to better understand customer needs, while creating tailored solutions.
Similar research by SproutSocial suggests that 64 percent of consumers are looking for brands that will connect with them online. An even bigger 70 percent often feel more connected with brands that have a CEO who’s active on social media.
The investment in personalization typically helps to pay off and reflects on the company’s bottom line. Studies show that even the slightest investment in tailored marketing can help improve customer satisfaction rates by 20 percent, and boost sales-conversion rates between 10 and 15 percent.
Household brands have caught wind of this, and now everything in their marketing is being personalized to create a more buyer-centric marketing funnel. This allows them to directly identify their buyer, and create an experience that will evolve throughout the sales funnel, providing tailored experiences across each stage, and establishing a lasting relationship.
Benefits of Marketing Personalization
With the necessary tools and resources, marketing teams can actively work towards a shared goal that encapsulates the dynamic consumer landscape and further considers the long-term objectives of the business.
Meeting customers where they are
Instead of having to search for where potential customers may be, marketing efforts can now directly put brands in contact with their desired audience. Personalization enables brands to meet their customers where they already are. Using the necessary tools, marketing teams can enable engagement with customers through the touchpoints they frequent most.
Influences customer buying behavior
Consumers want brands to know them on a personal level, and ensure that they can provide them with the necessary solutions they desire. However, at the same time, research shows that personalization can help improve, and increase the customer buying cycle. Nearly 76 percent of customers claim that they will continue buying from a brand that personalizes.
Increases visibility among small market segments
Personalization enables brands to reach smaller, and less frequented market segments through peer-to-peer recommendations. Companies that use personalized marketing have a higher chance of existing customers or clients recommending their services or products to a close friend or relative.
Driver of improved revenue
Company-specific personalization can help drive revenue, and improve bottom line performance. Research suggests that digitally native companies are able to increase revenue between 10% to 15% due to personalization in their marketing.
Faster scalability
Personalization can help accelerate business growth, and creating more intimate moments with customers can help lead to faster business performance in the near term while promoting long-term customer loyalty.
How To Implement Personalized Marketing for B2B
While brands may operate on a cross-functional basis within the consumer marketplace, creating a personalized marketing strategy that delivers improved ROI and reflects bottom-line performance is key to unlocking long-term success.
Have measurable goals
Younger brands often overlook the importance of having defined goals within their marketing teams, and what they are trying to achieve. Having a defined approach, and understanding what the problem is you’re trying to resolve through your marketing will help you establish a forward-going roadmap.
Identifying key goals, whether this may be to increase sales, create more engagement among customers online, or harness data analytics to create meaningful connections with clients will help align brand strategies going forward.
Without a measurable goal, and not knowing what you’re working towards or investing money in, you’ll overlook key components that are needed to create a more dynamic marketing plan, but more importantly, wasting valuable resources.
Understand your audience
Creating a customer profile, through analytics and insights, B2B brands can begin to create a clear framework of the type of customer you’re looking to reach.
Investing in these tools not only means that you have a better idea of who your customers might be, but it enables you to establish a sort of visual presentation of your clients and allows you to learn their behaviors through psychographic data.
Knowing who your audience is allows you to find them within the dynamic marketplace, and further identify the touchpoints through which you can reach them. Without these critical insights, you begin to lose sight of what you’re trying to create, and who you’re trying to reach.
Learn the value of data
Data has become a game-changer in marketing. B2B companies often rely on smaller data metrics that enable them to better understand how to develop more personalized marketing strategies.
The collaboration between big data, or even data analytics in the scope of marketing enables B2B marketing teams to create actionable marketing models that help to address near-term goals.
More than this, data ensures that B2B brands have a firm understanding of whether their marketing strategies are being deployed within the right market segments.
Instead of spending countless hours and resources having to extract valuable information through antiquated methods, digital data provides key analysis of how well a marketing strategy has been working, and where improvements will need to be made.
Measure omnichannel performance
Another way to create more personalized marketing as a B2B brand is to measure the success or failure of any marketing campaign across multiple channels. At this point, marketing teams would already need to have a clear idea of their customer profile, and through which touchpoint they can reach them.
While using multiple platforms or channels all at once can help to increase the scope of your marketing efforts, engagement measurability will help create forward-looking estimates, and how to appropriately distribute resources.
Understanding how each channel works, and meeting your marketing needs, you begin to build a clear idea of how you can invest more time, and financial resources in one or two platforms at a time.
This can help you develop a strategy that puts you in direct sight of the customer, but further tailor your message based on their engagement frequency, and the platform itself.
Conduct tests and optimize
Before launching a wide-scale campaign, across multiple channels, try and test the current strategy, and consider how this will need to be optimized to create more foolproof results.
Taking time to run several tests, allows you to make minor adjustments to your message, or content. Testing a campaign makes it easier to ensure that you have checked all the necessary boxes, but also align your efforts with the long-term goals you and your team have established at the beginning.
Conducting these tests means you spend more time optimizing, that way you can be certain that your message is being tailored for your desired audience, and that you have an edge over your competitors.
Create engaging content
Keep in mind that the content you are creating, and sharing across your channels will need to answer the consumer question, while at the same time providing valuable information.
Consumers often consider brand marketing content as a look into a company, and through the digital content, decide on whether they align with a brand or not.
While many other elements can play a role in brand perception through the customer’s point of view, digital content that helps to provide them with insight, resolve an unanswered question, and give them direction that aligns with their values will help create more personalized interaction between the brand itself, and those on the receiving end thereof.
Leverage digital marketing tools
One of the pillars of creating more personalized content is the use and application of digital marketing tools. Marketing teams in various industries are using advanced digital technology and platforms that help them find more suitable leads, and develop quality relationships.
With the use of these tools, B2B brands will have access to valuable market insights, while being able to leverage advanced capabilities that enable them to plan and develop more forward-thinking marketing strategies.
These tools act as an aid throughout the entire marketing journey and are focused on providing more efficient audience analysis. These tools can often be used interchangeably, however, in some instances, marketing teams will need to leverage multiple tools at once to deploy and maintain their campaigns.
Collaborate with customer-focused teams
As a brand, you need to understand that collaboration with other teams can help provide more clarity on the matter, and how personalization is more than analytics from a marketing point of view.
Partnering with other departments, or teams, such as sales or information technology would enable you to build a more unified customer profile.
By combining your efforts, and increasing your view of your customers, you begin to paint a more detailed image of who your customers are, what their pain points might be, what they’re searching for online, and where you can reach them.
This information is especially important at the start of your marketing campaign journey. Keep in mind, however, that too many cooks in the kitchen can ruin the broth. Meaning doesn’t include more team members than what you might need to help answer your initial demand and help set clear goals.
Understand business goals
Remember to align your business goals with your marketing ROI objectives. While you may be focussing on building more personalized marketing that helps to increase your ROI, you will also need to ensure that your initial business goals are taken into consideration at the same time.
Let’s say for example that your goal was to reach more consumers within concentrated segments of the market with tailored messaging to help create more valuable leads. Your marketing objectives would then need to be aligned in such a way that this can be successfully achieved, while also ensuring business growth, performance, and engagement among new potential customers.
Aligning these aspects of the business, and keeping your business goals within clear sight while establishing marketing objectives will help ensure that you remain on track to create more streamlined, and effective marketing campaigns that can provide your brand with an improved ROI.
Have a relevant message
Make sure to have a relevant message that understands what your customer’s pain points are. Your message needs to provide them with a solution and answer their questions. While it’s not always possible to take all of this into account during the campaign process, it’s necessary to have a good understanding of how any message needs to provide insight and solutions.
Give yourself, and your team enough time to research market trends and needs, and how this can effectively be incorporated into your message.
Strategies for Effective Audience Segmentation
An important branch of personalization is the use of audience segmentation, allowing brands to further categorize their customers into groups that share similar profiles. Segmentation provides marketing teams with the ability to create more detail-oriented marketing plans that allow them to further personalize content and content messages.
Customer needs
A better understanding of customer needs or problems will help provide clear direction for your segmentation. More than this, you can create clear guidance of your products and services, and how this will help resolve customer pain points.
Product or service benefit
As part of the customer segmentation strategy, create a fundamental plan that outlines the key benefits of your products or services. By doing this, you will create a more detailed-oriented process, which ensures the right customers are being targeted.
Understand audience behaviors
Once you’ve divided your customers into different segments, plan a strategy that works with the different behaviors of each market segment. This would entail using consumer data that understands not only their demographic but also looks at their online behavior, needs, and effective engagement strategies. messa
Target untapped market segments
Something else to include in your audience segmentation strategy is by looking at untapped market segments that provide potential upside. This could give way to reaching new market areas that are not being directly catered to, and further help to create a more experimental audience segmentation strategy.
Utilize different channels
Creating a successful marketing strategy requires teams to gather data from multiple sources, across various channels. This enables them to create more detailed customer segments that encompass beyond traditional marketplace customers.
Set forward-looking goals
As part of the process, set measurable goals that enable you to make adjustments as you progress. Without any forward-looking goals, you could be missing out on key market opportunities, but more importantly, overlook business objectives. Having goals will also enable you to measure your success, and see where changes might be required.
Test and optimize buyer personas
Conduct real-world tests on your market segments to determine whether your content will need improvement. Testing these strategies will help create a more optimized process that enables you to successfully target individual market segments more accurately.
Enhancing Personalization Across Digital Marketing Touchpoints
The accessibility of digital touchpoints allows brands to directly reach out to their target audience and allows consumers to come in contact with the brands more frequently. Touchpoints are valuable online channels for brands and enable them to establish engagement with their customers or any potential customers.
Through social media, brands can directly establish their presence, and adjust their audience segmentation to ensure more optimized message delivery. Social media can also be used as an after-purchase touchpoint, that allows customers to provide feedback and reviews.
Email marketing
During the customer journey, email marketing is used as an effective communication tool. This helps to establish a relationship between the customer and the brand, which allows brands to reach out to existing customers, and provide them with targeted messaging.
Customer reviews
Another potential touchpoint is customer reviews, which are often used as a pre-purchase determining factor, and an after-purchase touchpoint between the customer and brand. Reviews allow customers to share their experiences with the business itself but also help to provide insight to any potential customers.
Customer loyalty programs
Attempting to keep new customers engaged, or provide them with near-term upside, brands can create customer loyalty programs that provide them with an after-purchase touch point. Having a loyalty program could mean that potential customers could turn into more loyal supporters.
Infographics
Brands tend to leverage infographics as a before-purchase touchpoint, as this might directly influence the customer’s purchasing decision. With infographics, brands provide their audiences with a visual representation of the potential benefits and outcomes of their products or services.
How sales intelligence data can help with B2B Marketing Personalization
Sales intelligence data provides crucial information about B2B leads and prospects, helping in marketing personalization by:
Targeting the Right Audience: It enables marketers to identify the most relevant leads based on firmographic data, such as industry, company size, and location.
Tailoring Content: With insights into a lead’s role, interests, and pain points, marketers can create highly personalized content and messages that resonate with the individual’s needs.
Timing and Engagement: Sales intelligence data offers clues about a lead’s buying stage and engagement history, allowing marketers to time their outreach effectively and provide value when it’s most needed.
Improved Conversion Rates: Personalized marketing, based on sales intelligence, leads to more meaningful interactions, which, in turn, increase conversion rates and overall marketing effectiveness.
Conclusion
Marketing personalization helps to create brand awareness but further ensures that messaging efforts are directly targeted to the appropriate consumer audiences. This provides brands with the necessary insights to better understand their customers and their needs, but furthermore, provide solutions, and achieve their business goals simultaneously.
Leveraging consumer data is key to building a successful personalized B2B marketing campaign, as this enables brands to further improve customer segmentation, and boost their personalized messaging efforts across their digital touchpoints. Having a proactive marketing strategy enables the delivery of near-term business goals, but establishes long-term customer loyalty and brand visibility.