Personalized marketing continues to grow its fanbase among B2B companies that are looking for better ways to engage their audiences and set them up for conversions.
Of course, like most emerging trends, many of the early adopters are struggling to personalize their marketing efforts and see the same kinds of returns that have made this strategy so popular.
If that sounds a little too familiar, don’t worry. The good news is that you’re probably just a few simple tweaks away from empowering your marketing like never before.
3 Ways to Execute Your Personalized Marketing Strategy
Personalized marketing is becoming the new standard for B2B companies.
The reason that it hasn’t already become commonplace is because many marketers aren’t doing the following before implementing their strategies.
1. Get Clear About What Matters Most to Your Market
There are literally countless ways you could personalize your B2B company’s marketing strategy.
If you know an account is based in Chicago, you could include references to local landmarks and their sports teams.
If you know where a specific decision-maker at a company went to college, you could mention their alma mater in your emails.
Of course, doing these things probably won’t help much.
Those might seem like egregious examples, but the point is that many B2B marketers don’t understand what their prospects care about most. So, when they “invest” in personalization, what they’re really paying for are irrelevant details that won’t move the needle.
Remember that, in B2B marketing, you’re selling to 6.8 people on average for each account. Those different titles all care about different things. The CTO probably doesn’t care about the price as much as the CFO does. Personalizing your messaging to one is going to be very different than personalizing it to another.
While we can learn a lot from the success B2C marketers have already had with personalization, one mistake you can’t afford to make is crafting your efforts around just one person. Instead, gather data about the various titles at a prospect’s company that are responsible for buying decisions and speak to each of them.
2. Utilize Intent Data Personalized Marketing
For the past decade now, the message that you must use hard data to fuel your marketing has been stressed again and again. In the Digital Age, there’s little room for any marketer who wants to “go with my gut.”
However, the type of data that’s available has changed over the last couple of years. Specifically, if you’re not using intent data to shape your personalized marketing, your efforts are going to fall far short of any competitor that is.
Intent data refers to information about how a prospect interacts with online content. This kind of observed behavior can be aggregated in a way that helps predict their future behavior – or how they intend to behave.
That’s an extremely powerful tool for personalizing a B2B marketing strategy. Again, in the very near future, there will be little reason to attempt personalization without it because the result for your prospects will be almost unnoticeable compared to competitors that have intent data on their side.
In short, infusing your marketing with this kind of data makes it feel as though you’re picking up a conversation – one your prospect cares about dearly – right where it left off. That’s a big improvement over abruptly beginning a new one about a topic you think they probably care about because of a vague set of parameters they met at some point. The latter is what settles for personalization among most companies.
Mining this kind of data used to be a labor-intensive, expensive endeavor. Fortunately, Bombora and 6sense now makes it extremely easy to access intent data and begin leveraging it immediately. So, even if you’re completely new to the idea, you can quickly enjoy results like you’re a veteran.
3. Start Focusing on Email Marketing
Finally, email marketing offers the best opportunity for B2B companies to invest in personalization.
While onsite personalization is still paramount, an email can be customized to a much greater degree. It can focus on a specific segment, account, or even title.
However, many B2B personalization strategies fail because of marketers who can’t write a decent email. Learn how to craft a functional email marketing funnel, and all the upfront personalization work you do will lead to far greater sales.
We Wrote an Ebook on Personalization
Literally.
At Hushly, we’ve built a platform that increases conversions by giving B2B companies the opportunity to personalize their approach.
In our new ebook, we’ll show you five more absolutely essential methods to personalize your marketing. Download your copy now.
