Personalization: Get ahead, or fall behind
Experiencing a gap in your marketing?
As B2B marketers, we are constantly trying to better engage our prospects, to give them a slick customer experience and encourage them through our sales funnel quickly and successfully. We put together thoughtful, personalized marketing campaigns – from email and direct mail using persona-based content, to geo-targeted ads. We want to let them know that we understand their challenges – and better yet, we can help to resolve them.
Our outbound personalization efforts are through the roof, but what about our inbound personalization?
What happens when:
- We send our prospects a highly personalized campaign that leads them through to a generic website?
- A potential buyer researches us using our website, but is faced with the universal website content all our visitors see, that doesn’t highlight exactly what we already know they are looking for?
Have you noticed this gap in your marketing?
Where could I be missing a trick?
To really drive business growth in the B2B space, you need a marketing strategy that’s not only personalized, but consistent. Currently, most B2B marketers are providing their buyers with a jarring experience, between our personalized outbound marketing and our under-personalized inbound marketing. In many cases, this is causing lower engagement amongst our prospects.
As people ourselves, we already know that we love to be greeted with personalized ads that showcase exactly what we’re looking for. Receiving perfectly tailored marketing campaigns that detail our understanding of our buyer’s challenges and following up with the perfect solution for it works, and it works well.
However, when our personalized campaigns link to our generic website, or our buyers decide to visit it for more information, they’re required to hunt down the content they need. This can often lead to our buyers trailing through website pages, trying to find the exact solution or information they are looking for. Once the information is found, it’s often too late and their interest has been lost, causing them to click away from our websites (and onto a competitor’s!).
With around 94% of B2B buying journeys starting online, leads can enter the funnel at any stage, making our website our number one marketing asset. Our website needs to be somewhere that showcases both our products and our knowledge, in a simple, accessible, and tailored way.
Is inbound the new outbound when it comes to personalization?
Now we aren’t suggesting that outbound personalization doesn’t work. We all know that rich, segmented personalization performs very well. We believe by taking some of this engaging personalization and using it on our websites, we can enhance our customer experiences.
Today, we have so much informative data on our buyers, at every stage in their buyer journey. We know that our website is usually our prospect’s first touch point, so why aren’t we showcasing our knowledge better? Using this data to create highly relevant and tailored content that we can present to them from their very first visit, is a great way to boost engagement, speed up the buying process and position ourselves as experts in our fields.
Seeing relevant images or reading familiar language on our website that resonates, convinces our buyers that they’re in the right place. Even displaying personalized straplines can make a big difference in hooking them in. That’s the power of website personalization!
The way buyers select and engage with suppliers is changing and we all know the challenge of staying one step ahead of them. With prospects refusing to follow the personalized, linear journeys we’ve so lovingly created for them, our customer journeys are constantly changing. We mustn’t forget to see this change in behavior as an opportunity – an opportunity to look at our websites in a new light and personalize them, to not only benefit our buyers, but to benefit our business outcomes too.
Want to know more about personalization and how it can benefit you? Check out our other content:
- 5 reasons your business needs website personalization
- B2B marketing and personalization: what’s the missing link?
- It’s time to start making it personal
The best welcomes are always personal. If you’re struggling to curate relevant content and drive significant business growth, we can help you find the missing link.
Webeo is a dynamic, real-time website personalization software – made by B2B marketers, for B2B marketers. With Webeo, you can streamline digital experiences, display personalized calls-to-action and tailored welcome messages. As well as showcase relevant content, engaging imagery and language from the moment a visitor lands. The results? Better engagement, amplified marketing ROI, faster conversions – and more of them.
Written by Lauren Lee
