These days consumers are following an increasingly similar purchase path. This is true whether the shopper in question is a buyer for an enterprise company or a regular guy searching for products on Amazon. The challenge in the B2B world, then, is how to combine data and digital strategy over protracted sales cycles to appeal to this new target buyer. One crucial key to achieve this is personalization.
The statistics back this up. Not only do 78% of shoppers engage with personalized offers, but 87% of all consumers say that personally relevant content reveals how they feel about a brand. To shed more light on this trend, below we’ve listed some examples of B2B businesses that did personalization marketing right and reaped big success.
Expert Institute and email personalization
If you’re sending irrelevant content to your email subscribers then you aren’t doing email marketing right. You need only check your open rates to see whether this is a problem that afflicts you. Also know that this is a problem that is equally detrimental to success whether it’s B2B or B2C email marketing.
Expert Institute, a legal services platform for investment firms, went all in on personalized email marketing. First, they updated the database of recipients to ensure all first names were correct. But they went beyond using first names in the email subject lines; they also segmented their email lists according to levels of engagement from each of the recipients.
To those who didn’t engage at all, EI sent out free materials like ebooks and white papers; to those who engaged more, they included CTAs in their emails; and to those who engaged most they were able to soft-sell them with specific offers about Expert Institute’s services.
The results were that the Expert Institute saw a 200% increase in conversions, a 60% increase in email opens, and a 20% CTR.
CSC, account-based marketing, and personalization
Account-based marketing and personalization were made for each other. It’s a no-brainer in that ABM is about tailoring marketing strategies to the biggest accounts, but it’s the buyers and decision-makers who are in charge of purchase decisions. It goes without saying that you’d want to appeal to these buyers by personalizing their offers.
Computer Sciences Corporation, now known as DXC technology, is a company that provides IT infrastructure services to clients around the world. They realized the power of merging ABM with personalization and thus utilized a platform called Demandbase to do exactly that. The system used reverse IP lookups to target buyers at optimum times and deliver customized content. In essence, no matter where the audience was in the world, CSC could envelop those targets with the right messages at the right times.
All in all, CSC targeted 245 companies utilizing this strategy, and they got a boost in website visits and CTRs from 108 of those companies. The marketing campaigns also resulted in a 58% increase in views, which allowed their digital marketing team to move the prospects further down the funnel.
Evergage and personalized content recommendations
One of the tragedies in marketing is putting a large amount of time and effort producing great content only to have audiences ignore it. It’s enough to sap the spirit of even the most seasoned advertising pro. The best way to avoid this nightmare scenario is to employ personalization strategies to ensure your content is seen by those who will be most interested in it.
Evergage, a company that produces no shortage of content geared towards audiences at various stages in the funnel, solved this problem by offering their website visitors 1:1 content recommendations. This tactic meant each visitor saw a different piece of content depending on their search history, interests, and past purchases/downloads.
The marketers accomplished this through an algorithmic engine built into the site navigation and which made the recommendations via the resources page. It’s a good example of a company that, instead of ignoring the “Amazon effect” of modern commerce, where every recommendation is personalized, harnessed that power in the B2B world.
Datto, Inc. and geo-targeting
It’s hard to overstate the importance of location-based marketing in B2B. Many enterprise businesses, be they manufacturing or tech companies, often are ensconced in a single locale and service the community in which they operate. Marketers have many options to reach businesses in their specific locales, including optimizing keywords for local internet searches.
Datto, Inc., a business continuity solution provider, thought local when they wanted to maximize attendance for their live events. They’d been doing traveling road shows across the U.S. but became frustrated when they couldn’t reach a majority of their target audience. Turns out most of their website visitors were overlooking the news of live shows after realizing that particular event wasn’t going to be in their area.
The solution to this problem was geo-targeting. With a bit of technical ingenuity their marketing team devised a strategy to target promotional materials to only those website visitors who lived within a 100-mile radius of a specific event. This way they didn’t have to cast such a wide net and could instead focus on those targets that were most likely to be able to attend the event.
The results speak for themselves: Datto Inc. reported a 12% CTR boost which led to 500 extra registered attendees per live event plus.
Conclusion
If there’s one major takeaway from all of the above examples, it’s don’t be afraid to get creative with your personalization marketing. Use all available technology and AI platforms at your disposal to harvest the necessary data to craft personalized messages to your specific targets
Related Articles:
5 Ways to Leverage Personalization in Your B2B Marketing Strategy
