Content Personalization for B2B Marketers

Prologue

Benefits of Content personalization for B2B marketers are innumerable as it is the future-proof way for the marketers to attract, engage, convert as well as retain the customers in an era of digitization of everything. Harvard Business Review depicts content personalization as a powerful strategic move towards improving the contextual relevance of pieces of content for customers. According to a report by Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends Report, digital ad spend has increased by 22%. Furthermore, Gartner’s research shows that spending on ad & marketing technology is at the highest, amounting to a stunning 29% of the total marketing budget, thus, making it the single largest area of investment.  B2B customers now have access to endless information & this gives them ample information about an array of brands to choose a product or service from. Brands nowadays have access to advanced cloud-hosted data analytics platforms & customers are very well aware of it. The data analysis & interpretation for trend mining & analytics can be employed in content personalization. Benefits of content personalization for B2B marketers pay off in the form of improved return on marketing investment (ROMI), as the data can serve as the microscopic lens for understanding the customers better & improving their experiences. Ways Content Personalization Benefits B2B Marketers If the content is the “king”, personalization is the “queen”. Gartner predicts that by 2020, smart personalization engines employed to recognize customer intent will enable digitized businesses to increase their profits by 15%. The benefits of content personalization for B2B marketers are innumerable & not essentially limited to driving KPIs. According to Google, 55% of its search results are never viewed. What is the secret ingredient then that drives content strategy to success for the B2B marketers? Well, it’s personalized content, those carefully articulated pieces written keeping the customer interest captivation & their questions in mind. The experience-economy is in turn driven by a knowledge-based answering framework – wherein the marketers need to research their ideal ersonas & serve them with personalized content at each stage of their respective buying cycles to improve their experiences & ultimately accentuate the bottom-line conversions.

According to research from Forrester, 77% of the customers choose, recommend or pay more to brands serving personalized service or experience & a survey from Magnetic/MyBuys found that 58% of customers were able to exchange their personal information for more personalized experiences.

The benefits of content personalization for B2B marketers are numerous, all leading to improved Return on Investment (ROI) and begin as the customers are served with personalized pieces of content across omnichannel. Predictive content strategy & Dynamic content are the two most important ingredients when thinking of serving personalized content to the customers. Learn more: 5 Essentials of Dynamic Content for Smarter B2B Marketing We have enlisted the key benefits of content personalization for B2B marketers, as under:

1. Optimizes Customer-Experiences (CX):

In an experience-driven economy marketing & optimizing, customer experiences should be every marketer’s priority. Steve Cannon, President & CEO of Mercedes Benz USA, quotes the importance of CX-indexing & optimization as follows:

“Customer experience better be at the top of your list when it comes to priorities in your organization. Customer experience is the new marketing.”

Optimized customer experiences streamline the buying cycle & bolster the sales revenue for the customers.

2. Evolved Personalization making it “Real-Time”:

Customer data is fetched from innumerable sources including the first & third-party intent data, reviews, sales data & insights gathered from the demographic, firmographic, technographic, psychographic & ‘fit-data’ insights. With the evolution of technology & simultaneous amalgamation of diverse channels across the web in marketing the pursuit of personalization has expanded, so much so that several experts have felt the need to assign a new buzzword to this evolved level of “hyper-personalization” that is now being expected from & delivered to the customers. Jeremy Waite, Business Designer & Chief Customer Officer at IBM iX elucidates the evolution of personalization in real-time adding the terminology “personification” to explain its expanded realm within the B2B landscape. He explains personification as a personalization trend as under:

“Personification is the act of giving potential customers the right message, on the right platform, using the right channel, at the right time – when you DON’T have their personal information.”

Personification doesn’t replace personalization but signifies its evolved realm. It has additional benefits in a post-GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) era for B2B marketers. Read more:  How to set-up a Strong Email Preference Centre in the Post-GDPR Era

3. Personalization & Dynamic Content Boost Sales & Establish Brand Equity:

Dynamically generated content having smart content can be used on websites, newsletters, email marketing campaigns, marketing videos, message boards & portfolios. When using dynamic content, the benefits of using personalized content for B2B marketers include strong brand equity & ability to audit & upgrade the content in real-time to match pace with the customers’ expectations & pain-points. Dynamic content can also be subjected to A/B testing, improving the overall performance of the brands’ websites.

4. Omnichannel Marketing for Improved Sales Revenue, Reputation Building & Management:

Omni-channel marketing impeccably integrates the diverse communication channels that businesses use to communicate with customers to optimize their experiences on their most favored channels. While building an omnichannel experience strategy, the marketers must look into diverse stakeholders viz. product, marketing, sales, customer support & customer success. Optimizing omnichannel experience involves a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling & serving customers in a way that creates an all-inclusive & integrated customer experience no matter the platform across the web that the customer uses to research. All omnichannel experiences are using multi-channels, however, not all multi-channel experiences are omnichannel. The brands can leverage strong social media marketing & targeted campaigns, for attracting, engaging, converting & retaining customers for improved sales revenues as well as to generate happy, satisfied & returning customers who purchase again & again & also upkeep the omnichannel reputation building & management process. Read more:  How Omnichannel Reputation Management Assists in B2B Branding

5. Leveraging Content Clustering for Lead Generation:

In content clustering, contextual clusters of content are created around a core topic after in-depth research about the preferences of the audiences. Content clusters help in improving the authority of the website – showcasing the expertise of the website in providing valuable information on a wide range of niche-specific topics. With the inclusion of artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML), & assimilation of intent data for the creation of predictive content, the benefits of content marketing for B2B marketers transcend the conventional boundaries of inbound marketing to extend to the precognitive & emotional aspects of marketing. Read more: 5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Scales up B2B Sales & Marketing Wrapping It Up In an experience driven-economy, there are several benefits of content personalization for B2B marketers. According to Infosys, 74% of customers feel dejected & frustrated with un-personalized content. With the inclusion of technology in the digitized landscape for B2B, like never before, marketers have seamlessly endless opportunities to improve the customers’ experiences through personalized content. With 2020, around the corner, it is evident that content personalization will be the commonplace & how B2B marketers have been creating & delivering personalized experiences will continue to involve. Valasys Media is a well-known & trusted entity in the B2B marketplace for helping customers optimize their B2B endeavors by designing custom-made campaigns aimed at improving their bottom-line endeavors. Our specialized services like lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services have all been designed to help marketers architect their trajectories to perennially healthy sales pipelines. Contact us to optimize your B2B marketing endeavors now.