We're sorry to tell you this, but B2B buyers don’t want to talk to you anymore. To many buyers, you’ve gone from being a helpful salesperson to a nuisance. Today, 87% of B2B tech buyers want self-serve options that they can use whenever they want during their buyer journey and they’re afraid to spend significant amounts of money online without ever talking to a salesperson.
The only way to break through the clutter is to use a personalized marketing approach. When you’re reaching out to hundreds or thousands of prospects, customization can be challenging to scale if you don’t have the right B2B marketing platform to manage a B2B account based marketing strategy.
1. Define Your Target Audience
It’s difficult to personalize if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach. The first step in content personalization is to define who you’re targeting. To be effective, marketing and sales must be aligned in their efforts to target the right prospects.
You can target in different ways:
- By segment or industry vertical
- By specific buyer profiles (personas)
- By buyer journey stages
- By account
- By individual lead
Successful marketers today are crafting content personalization for each of these targets for B2B demand generation, lead generation, and nurturing.
2. Understand the Digital Buyer Journey
Do you really know your prospects and the way they buy today? A lot has changed in the past few years.
Take the time to dig through your research to find out the journey buyers are taking to help understand the key engagement points. For example, take note of:
- Length of the sales cycle
- Engagement at each stage
- Pipeline velocity
- Marketing content > Website
- Website > Contact
- Deal close rate
This provides a baseline for you to measure success and provides insight into how buyers progress on their way to a sale. When you have a firm grasp on the process, you can then attack each area to eliminate roadblocks and improve performance.
3. Develop Content for Every Stage
In an ideal world, every time a B2B buyer is searching for something online, you will have already developed content that matches their search intent. That may not be possible in the real world, but you can create the key building blocks that resonate with buyers at each stage of their journey.
A good place to start is to map each stage, determine the types of buyers involved at each stage, and uncover the type of content they need at key moments.
Remember that B2B buyers are in control these days. They decide when they are ready to move to the next stage. Your job is to help nudge them along the journey. Both your inbound marketing and outbound marketing efforts should focus on driving them through the stages.
Awareness
Buyers are just entering the marketplace and beginning to do their research. They’re not qualified leads yet and they may not even be in your lead funnel at this point. Content needs to be educational about interests and not overly promotional. They’re not yet ready to shop for solutions. They may not even know what the problem is yet.
Your goal here is to expose your thought leadership, engender trust, and build awareness of your brand. If you’re using an ABM platform, you’re trying to capture as many leads as possible so that your account based marketing execution can start the nurturing and personalization process.
Marketers often use blog posts, eBooks, landing pages, and educational videos at this stage.
Consideration
As buyers enter the consideration phase, you should continue to deliver relevant content that is personalized to this stage, buyer personas, and individual targets. Your content needs to shift focus a bit though.
B2B buyers will have clearly identified a problem they have and are searching for a potential solution. Your job now is to help them find that solution and steer them to you. Buyers need to be convinced that your products or services can get the job done for them.
Marketers often use case studies, white papers, webinars, targeted email, and product demos to help influence buyers. Personalization can create deeper engagement. The more customized you can make the content, the more relevance and impact it will have.
Purchase
As prospects enter the purchase phase, they are getting close to making a decision. They know they have a problem and that they need to find a solution. Your content needs to be persuasive to make them realize they should do business with you rather than someone else.
Marketers use various tactics at this stage, including testimonials, demos or free trials, and specific product offers. Personalizing the content to this stage of the buyer journey is crucial in driving prospects into the final stage and becoming customers.
4. Automate Delivery & Triggers
Effective personalization is more than using a prospect’s name or tweaking a subject line in an email. What drives the process is delivering relevant content at exactly the right time. When you do that, buyers start to believe you understand their business and needs.
While you may be able to personalize at this level for a small handful of high-priority targets, you need a B2B marketing automation platform to personalize at scale. Marketing for B2B customers requires a delicate balance. If you are sending too much content or the wrong content, you can easily move into the spam category. If you do too little, you may miss the opportunity.
One of the best strategies is to identify the triggers that indicate buyer behavior and let your automation handle the personalization process. Triggers can be based on buying signals, engagement levels, search behavior, and content consumption.
Creating automated workflows based on buyer behavior can help you personalize the nurturing process and drive them through the buyer journey.
5. Optimize Your Strategy
No matter how well you plan your B2B marketing and sales strategy, there’s always room for improvement. That’s OK because there are easy ways to measure and optimize.
As you build your content, every item should have a goal. Think of them as the micro-conversions you need. In other words, when someone receives or views your content, what do you want them to do? Then measure whether they do it. If they don’t, you may need to re-evaluate your content. If they do, great. Congrats! Now look to see if there’s a way you can make it even more successful.
You can apply this optimization strategy across every facet of your campaigns, including:
- Nurturing processes
- Digital delivery channels
- Content performance
Pay particular attention to the key moments where leads move from one stage to the next and see if there are specific triggers that led to faster buying cycles.
Personalization at Scale
To make all this work in concert and personalize at scale, you need deep buyer insights, a sales orchestration strategy, and a healthy dose of AI to help create a customized experience and targeted campaigns.
That’s exactly what the Folloze Buyer Experience platform does. We help you target accounts, contextualize and personalize content based on first-party and third-party data, recommend the right content at every step, and guide your sales and marketing orchestration. You also get robust reporting at the account and individual level to gauge effectiveness and measure ROI.
If you’d like to see our platform in action, request a demo today. Let us show you how personalizing the buyer journey can improve your process and your bottom line.
