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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being joined by Nick Mason, CEO of Turtl, on our podcast and we talked about the power of behavioral psychology in driving purchase decisions.
What was most fascinating was our discussion around extrinsic and intrinsic motivators and how we as marketers should be responding to drivers to encourage buyers to want to engage and ultimately become customers of our business.
So what does this mean? In basic terms, extrinsic motivation arises from external factors, you are doing something in order to gain an external reward, intrinsic motivation refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, providing personal satisfaction.
We then got on to the topic of the part this plays in the buyer journey. Let’s take the B2B website as an example. We know that B2B buyers do not visit B2B websites for entertainment, if they need a bit of light relief from a hectic day, their go to is going to be cat videos on YouTube. Therefore the behavior of visiting a B2B website is driven by extrinsic motivators, for example, feeling pain around a problem you need to solve or in many cases your boss asking you to investigate and research a new piece of technology or service. So if the extrinsic motivation gets them to our site, we can then use intrinsic motivators to keep them there.
intrinsic vs extrinsic explained
This is where personalization can play a huge part and there are two parts to this too.
First of all assuming we have the basics right in terms of UX and an easy to navigate site, our focus should be on connection and driving engagement as fast as possible. As most B2B buyers are time poor, think about the power of a relevant and personalized experience as soon as they hit your website versus a generic one size fits all. Let’s not be naïve, that buyer is looking at a number of your competitors too and if you can connect with a more interesting, enjoyable, experience that leverages intrinsic motivation you are on to a winner.
How does this work? Well at the start of the journey, identifying the prospect using firmographic data and serving a personalized experience accordingly is going to create a powerful zing of enjoyment as soon as they hit the website. It also means they are more likely to stick around and explore further. A visitor from the manufacturing industry is likely to have a very different set of challenges than one from the retail sector so presenting and addressing those needs fast is essential. The enjoyment comes from making it immediate, not forcing the buyer to search for what’s important to them and wasting time but respecting that time and surfacing this straight away.
It’s also not a homepage only deal, our aggregated customer analytics in Webeo shows that customers who personalize a minimum of the top 4 most visited pages in the journey get a faster and more powerful conversion increase.
We know the B2B buyer journey has multiple stages so thinking beyond the first visit is essential, this is where behavioral personalization comes in. Responding to what the buyers viewed last time they were on this site and personalizing with similar content relevant to their current stage of the funnel, also serves to make that second, third, and fourth visit more enjoyable and interesting. At this point persona level personalization also comes into its own, so Webeo customers use their Marketo, Hubspot or Pardot integrations to give a different message to each decision maker job role based on what’s important to them.
If you’re doing 1 to 1 ABM you can put that buyer delight on steroids, really harnessing all the insight you have on that organization in a unique website experience from the very first visit.
From a conversion perspective this absolutely pays off and one of the best parts is that the association of enjoyment with your brand will start the whole sales process and customer journey on a truly positive note, impacting experience all the way through to sale and retention. What’s not to love.
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