How to use Data to improve B2B Personalization in 2020
Contextual content is something that has always been imperative for B2B marketers. In an era of the Internet of everything & Intent data, the marketers have are constantly scaling the level of personalization delivered to their audiences, aiming to reach an acme. This helps them sustain & grow in a highly competitive marketplace. Also, optimizing B2B personalization will hold the key to stir up the operationalization efficiencies of the organizations in the year 2020, where the rise of new techniques such as artificial intelligence & machine learning will help organizations articulate better targeting within their niches, leveraging algorithms such as k-means clustering & by refining their niches. This will further help the sales teams achieve their core bottom-lines.
Customer data lies at the heart of data cleansing, processing, clustering & targeting & helps the marketers opt for a strategic approach to attract, engage, convert & retain their potential & existing customers.
But the vital question is what data points are vital? How to use data to improve B2B Personalization in 2020? Do we need all the data in the world or just utilization of the correct data points will suffice to generate the most useful insights for B2B marketers, helping them to optimize the B2B personalization trends in 2020?
Let’s explore the key to optimize B2B personalization in the year 2020.
How Companies Should Use Data to Improve B2B Personalization
“Keep it contextual” has always been the mantra for the B2B personalization. Delivering hyper-personalized experiences is something the marketers swear by to inculcate in their DNA & which happens to be the prime focus for the B2B marketers in the year 2020.
Converting prospects to leads & leads to sales is the ultimate aim for the marketers & for that using the right data-points is imperative.
The following quote by Cara Olson, Senior Director of partnerships at DEG Digital implies the importance of personalization:
“With many brands spending the past two years focusing on data and integrations, I predict that the next several years will focus taking advantage of the singe view of the customer.”
Optimizing for B2B personalization includes optimizing for SEO & writing essentially good content after refining the data-points & includes the following main steps:
a. Optimize the Google Core Algorithms such as BERT:
Marketers need to write content that not only is contextual & SEO friendly but also translates the big data trends into actionable signals that break the silos between several marketing endeavors & helps marketers integrate their endeavors for optimized users’ experiences & sales conversions.
A content abiding by the principles of ‘E-A-T’ (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness) automatically optimizes the content for the unsupervised model called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) which one of Google’s core algorithmic updates. BERT is a bi-directional, pre-trained unsupervised natural language processing (NLP) model that looks into words before & after entities & context pre-trained on Wikipedia to provide a better understanding of semantic.
b. Articulate Your B2B Email Marketing Personalization to be Industry Specific:
In a research conducted by Corporate Visions, a sales skill training & marketing messaging company industry emails had 24% higher Click-Through-Rates (CTRs) & almost 50% higher meetings set than emails personalized according to demography, personal and industrial information or personal & company information.
Industry-specific targeting helps optimize B2B personalization.
Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions stresses that marketers shouldn’t overdo personalization.
The report by Corporate Visions summarizes that prospects are more intrigued by a sense of curiosity when they come to learn about something that helps them discover an industry-specific resolution devised by the marketers through their products or services:
“So when you share a story about how a similar company struggled & solved a common industry concern, (the recipients are) better able to project themselves into the story and eager to find what happened next.”
According to a report published in Content Marketing Institute, one doesn’t require to refine personalization as per demographic & psychographic profiles.
The mere utilization of data relevant to the prospects’ industry can help in optimizing B2B personalization.
c. Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning, including the Best of Conversational AI to engage with the Customers’ data in real-time & Optimize Customer Experience:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are constantly evolving. They have transcended the B2B dominion & help marketers optimize B2B personalization. New developments in AI & ML are being tested every day & their implementation continues to take the B2B personalization trends by storm.
AI can be incorporated to refine targeting & help the purpose of B2B personalization & sales revenue optimization of the B2B brands:
- AI can help organizations showcase their visions & values to their target personas, thereby, helping them scale-up B2B personalization & sales conversions
- AI helps address the pain-points of the customers proactively & in real-time, it lifts-up the bar of customer experience (CX). This has a positive impact on customers’ intent to buy & also assists in omnichannel reputation management
- In a highly-competitive & dynamic B2B dominion, driven by AI, the B2B organizations need to set-up, evangelize & recapitulate their ethical decision-making process. This essentially includes proper handling, storage & processing of the vital data-points of the customers including their personal data.
According to TJ Claridge, Senior Manager for Analytics at Merkle, Customer Experience will be a key brand differentiator for organizations in the year 2020.
Customer trust is a competitive advantage for the companies & helps them structuring & optimization of B2B personalization.
When a C-suite fraternity embraces ethics & AI, all the marketers of an organization understand that ethics is the central part of culture & is reflected in its workflow.
Amalgamating business ethics, AI & vision will help B2B brands improve personalization in 2020.
The natural language models for artificial intelligence that can interpret human words, converse with people & perform tasks or computation with the help of natural languages are called Conversational AI platforms.
Leveraging conversational AI platforms such as Chatbots can help to optimize B2B personalization by engaging with the right prospects & customers at the right time.
Google on the 28th of January 2020, Google introduced Meena, a neural network having 2.6 billion parameters. This is an essential progress in the direction of deep-learning to strike a conversation with diverse audience groups in real-time to optimize users’ experience.
Google also released Sensibleness & Specificity Average (SSA). This metric to help Google quantify the endeavors of their conversational agents such as marketing chatbots.
According to Google humans score 86% on the Specificity Average index while the score of Meena follows soon behind at 79% SSA.
Conversational AI is a fairly new & evolving B2B personalization trend which when integrated with omnichannel experiences can help skyrocket B2B personalization in 2020.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, in his public conference on AI, described the importance of AI as under:
“We’re at the beginning of a golden age of AI. Recent advancements have already led to an invention that previously lived in the realm of science fiction – and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.”
Conversation AI will assist in the improvement of B2B personalization in 2020 in the following ways:
- Conversation AI helps strike a conversation with the context in real-time & thus, optimizes users’ experiences & scales up B2B personalization
- Early adoption & implementation of conversational AI techniques will give B2B marketers a competitive edge
- Conversational AI will assist the marketers with optimal data collection to deliver more consistent customer service
d. Use Intent Data:
Intent data helps marketers predict the purchase intent of their prospects, customers and website visitors. Intent data can be first-party as well as third-party. Integration of the Intent-data with Martech tools & CRM helps marketers in optimizing their data-driven-decision-making process.
Optimizing B2B personalization in 2020 depends on how marketers use predictive insights derived from intent data analysis:
- Intent Data Analysis Helps in Prospecting & Figuring-out the Look-alike Audiences
- Intent Data helps in delivering high-quality leads for Sales Teams
- Intent Data Helps in Automating Marketing Operations
e. Understand that Google’s 2020 core Algorithmic Updates will volatile rankings & act accordingly:
Google updated its core search engine algorithms in January 2020 & as a result followed the featured snippet update on January 22.
The key features of the update are as follows & marketers need to understand them & effectively use SEO data to tailor B2B personalization:
- The update has made specific niches more volatile
- The update will impact the top Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Web pages highlighted under featured snippet positions will no longer be duplicated in organic rankings. Previously, the web pages frequently used to appear twice on the first page on the search engines, provided they achieved a featured-snippet position.
The frequency of duplicated listings was 28%, reveals data from seoClarity.
According to Yulia Ibragimova, Data Scientist at SEMRush:
“We can see that the latest Google Update was quite big and was noticed almost in every category.”
She also added that all the website categories witnessed changes & that the update wasn’t aimed at particular topics.
However, like the other core updates, *YMYL (Your Money Your Life) niches are witnessing higher vulnerability than the none-YMYL niches, deduces a report from RankRanger.com.
Optimizing B2B personalization after the core update will involve abiding by the best practices for creation, execution & promotion of content strategy.
Marketers need to re-evaluate their content strategies to ensure the following:
- Content should provide original research, reporting & analytical information to feature higher on SERPs
- Content should provide a comprehensive insight into the chosen topic
- Content should provide some unique inferences which are insightful & beyond obvious
- Simply copying or rewriting content will adversely impact your content strategy
- Page Title of the content should be optimized & should provide a zest for the things to follow
- Headings shouldn’t be superfluous or unnecessarily exclamatory
- How your pieces of content are shared by your employees & audience groups at large
- Content should of value so that it can be referenced by printed media, ebooks, etc.
- Content should have expert insights, the background of the author or site, clear sourcing & should link wither to the author’s bio page or the company’s ‘about us’ page
- Content should be trusted capable of creating impressions & should be recognized as an authoritative source across the web for a particular topic
- Content should be written by a professional or an enthusiast who is well-versed with the topic
- Typos & factual errors of any type must be absent
- Content should inspire trust for issues pertaining to money or life
- Content should display a consistent style & formatting
- Content shouldn’t appear sloppy or hastily written
- Content strategy should be omnichannel and not confined to individual pages or websites
- Content should be devoid of an excessive amount of ads interfering with the main content
- Optimization for mobile devices matters
- When compared to the other pages on search results, content should provide substantial value
- The genuine interests of visitors on the website must be served with the help of content
- Content should be written from the purpose to resolve the pain-points of the customers, not to advertise or rank on SERPs
Introspecting the overall content strategy will help marketers optimize the indexes of B2B personalization as the core updates are meant to improve the content quality experiences for the customers. Rankings may be set-backs for some websites, it doesn’t mean that your content isn’t of value, it just means that it needs to add more values or is lacking in certain aspects that might be present in your competitors’ studies, initiating Google to prefer other pieces of content over yours.
Wrapping Things Up
The year 2020 will give B2B marketers a chance to shuffle their core marketing endeavors to optimize the personalization of their prospects & customers. Competitive benchmarking, multi-variant analysis of your sales funnel & keeping an eye on the buyers’ cycles & their motivations to buy will not only help you in keeping your quality leads engaged but will also ensure that your core business bottom-lines are optimized. Use the customer data & the points enlisted above to document an invisible marketing plan, employ trend analysis & scale-up your B2B personalization.
There’s a lost transcending the B2B marketing realm in 2020 & the expert services by Valasys Media will help you dominate the year. Our expert services lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services best place you with clearly defined marketing objectives to achieve the successful results.
Contact us to achieve your pipeline goals & for any help with documentation of an organization-wide strategy to optimize B2B personalization & customer experience indexes.