B2B Marketing Personalization: Everything You Need to Increase Your ROI

How To Personalize Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Custom-tailor your B2B message by applying the correct data to the right marketing touchpoints. Here’s how.

Back in 2019, 85% of marketers were aware that personalization drives success. One pandemic and three years later, that number has grown to a whopping 92% .
Time and time again, personalized marketing continues to prove its enormous value. Leading brands rely on it for everything from lead gen to relationship-building, and they are rarely disappointed. Applied in in most areas, personalization is already a staple of modern-day consumerism.

B2B customers expect personalization, too

The key to B2B success, and not only in marketing, is seeing an actual person behind a company facade. Every business has a decision-maker that wants to be catered to – it’s up to you to discover that person and find out their needs and preferences. Their data is your competitive edge.
Alternatively, you’ll need to find a way to humanize an entire organization.
Experience will help you choose the most effective approach. However, to gain some, you first need to learn the basics of B2B marketing personalization and the expert tips, tricks, and hacks. Here’s how a personalized marketing campaign can help you increase your B2B sales.

Personalization starts with the right person

The person that your marketing campaign should talk to might be a real human being with a real agenda. If so, their job is to procure the best possible product or service for their company. They act on behalf of their organization but in their own unique way.
You’ll be selling to an entire team of procurement experts in another company.Unfortunately, you can’t cater to all of them individually.
In both cases, B2B personalization starts with an ideal customer persona, which is always virtual. Ideally, this customer profile will be as detailed as an individual can be. However, if the buyer is an entire company, B2B marketing must rely on broader data to help tailor the right message.

In personalized marketing, data is everything

Quite literary, marketing data is everything and everywhere.
Experts recognize four types o data for B2B marketing personalization:
1. Demographic, which describes the person behind the brand;
2. Firmographic, which includes information about the company;
3. Contextual, which reveals how a customer interacts with you;
4. Behavioral, which helps position a customer within the funnel.
There are a few different ways to obtain this data, so you’ll have to decide whether to buy it from a third party or harness it internally. If you choose the latter approach, you’ll need a reliable tool for tracking, storing, and analyzing demographic and firmographic data opportunities .
In one way or another, your marketing strategist should be equipped with necessary firmographic data such as industry, company size, type of business, and location. As for demographics, look for personal info like name, job title, and role. That should be enough for the beginning.

It’s crucial to streamline the buyer’s journey

Whether they’re buying for themselves or on behalf of their company, every customer wants the same thing – the top products at a fair price as soon as possible, with no hassle. That’s where personalization meets streamlining to create a smooth journey for every individual buyer.
To do that, you need to know not only their industry and job title but also contextual and behavioral information, such as the type of device they use for interacting with your brand. To discover high-quality leads, you’ll also need to obtain a history of these interactions.If they’ve visited your website multiple times, you need to know.
Did they contact you before? Have they requested a free trial? Find out.

Personalize your B2B website in real-time

All this information will help you create ideal customer personas for multiple segments. Using your data, you should be able to prioritize them, too. Which segment delivers the greatest number of quality leads? Depending on your budget, you can start personalizing for a few of them.
Real-time website B2B marketing personalization works like this:
The landing page , which is usually the first and most important touchpoint, should be different for each segment. That especially applies to the hero image, the main headline, introductory content, and CTA. Customers trust brands that show social proof, so personalize that too.
If your data shows that tech CEOs are your most loyal customers, personalize for them first. Website personalization should get these leads one step closer to the funnel.

Custom-tailor your B2B video content

Many landing pages include a video message as well. This type of content has yielded enough convincing power for instant on-site conversion in recent years. Around 87% of marketers report that video gives them a positive ROI, while 86% of them say that it is an effective lead gen tool.You can probably assume that all of the ideal customer personas from all of your segments enjoy seeing a video and not be wrong. It’s simply the fastest way to introduce a brand and its value proposition. If not as an instant conversion tool, it’s definitely worth using it for leads.
For whatever purpose, video content should also be custom-tailored to specific viewers. Send emails from one real person to another

In most customer journeys, email comes after the lead has been introduced to the brand. A good time to send the introductory email is after the lead leaves your website with or without making the first move. In this email, you can nurture the lead with VIP content or a special offer.
Every email goes to a unique address, which is a perfect opportunity for personalization.Demographic data is critical in email marketing since you’re addressing the actual person. Address them by their name and create an offer that is – by accident or research – a perfect fit for their industry, type of business, and role. Sign off your emails as a real person.
You can use this tactic for lead nurturing but also retargeting and retention

Conclusion

Unlike B2C, which requires only personal information about prospects, B2B must look at every customer as a person and an employee of a target company. Having both types of information is key to unlocking a 360-degree view of a potential buyer, which leads to fast conversions.By tracking entire industries, B2B marketing can gain invaluable insight about prospect companies and the type of people they employ. The more detailed the data, the bigger the chance for B2B marketing personalization and – by extension – for quality leads and increased ROI.