During your presentation at the ABM Conference 2020, you discussed the ‘personalisation gap’. Could you explain what that is for anyone who didn’t attend?
The personalisation gap is the gap B2B buyers experience in the personalisation efforts of B2B brands and marketers. This gap creates a jarring experience for the buyer, as part of their journey is personalised and shows a brand understands and recognises their needs, and part is completely generic, treating them the same as every other buyer.
Evidence that this gap exists is based on research from a number of sources, including B2B Marketing, that state that while 75% of B2B marketers are using personalisation in some form, 60% are only personalising outbound activities, such as email, direct mail and paid social. These activities are the part of the buyer journey the marketer can control, as they have made the choice on what to communicate when. However, when the buyer wants control and makes the decision to interact with a brand on their own terms, this powerful personalised element no longer exists.
Specifically, this gap exists around inbound activities – primarily the website. On one side, we’re recognising them, understanding their needs and responding to these in our communications, yet when they reach out to us, we’re serving them the same generic experience as everyone else. It’s a little like meeting someone at a party, connecting with them and building a great friendship, and then completely blanking them when we see them in the supermarket the next day.
In the presentation, you discussed the results of some of your organisation’s clients, including a 56% increase in page views, and a 67% increase in time spent on website. What do marketers need to do specifically to achieve such impressive results?
There are many use cases for website personalisation and marketers need to think about the segments their customers fall into to understand the best way to maximise their personalisation efforts. Once these have been established, it’s about building out those audiences so they are identified when they visit the organisations website either by IP address or through integration into MA or CRM and using the cookie tracked data there.
The most common use case we see is personalisation by vertical – many B2B brands sell one solution, but the needs and challenges for a buyer in one sector are very different from those in another. They need to think about what is most important to the buyer in each vertical that would demonstrate understanding and highlight the benefits of the solution in the most powerful way, ensuring this reaches that buyer as soon as they hit the website. This is where creating a personalised experience comes in. Starting with the home page and moving through all the key pages in the buyer journey, marketers should be thinking how they are delivering the right content at the right time. To engage this typically means changing headlines and key imagery to ensure it resonates with the individual. Industry-related imagery creates a powerful connection quickly, and this is one of the first things we encourage. Then, it’s about pulling the right content, both in the body copy and links to articles and use cases a buyer would find most valuable. Finally, proof points such as logos of clients in the same vertical. All of this can be delivered on the home page, and then it’s about ensuring the rest of the journey continues this, right through to CTA and conversion. If marketers are already delivering personalisation on their outbound activity, they will have a clear idea of what works, and then it’s just translating this into their website experience, effectively plugging the personalisation gap.
Other use cases our clients have are different personalised experiences based on the size of the organisation. For example, an SME may get a different experience to an enterprise organisation. This is about relevance as much as anything. Show me what’s important to me fast to get me engaged.
Both of these examples are based on ‘at scale’ personalisation and most clients combine this with personalised ABM experiences, creating a unique website experience for one organisation based on all the insight they have uncovered as part of their ABM insight gathering. This is very powerful, and the personalisation gap becomes even more obvious when an organisation is delivering one-to-one personalisation elsewhere and failing on their website.
Personalisation is obviously an effective weapon in marketers’ arsenal, so why isn’t it being used more? Is it just a hangover from a bygone era of marketing? Is it a lack of insight? Or is it something else?
Well research shows us it’s two things. Firstly, there’s definitely an effort over reward challenge. The desire to personalise is absolutely there, and we’ve reached a point now where we do need to follow our B2C colleagues and mobilise personalisation across the entire journey. However, most marketers are making choices every day about where to invest their energy to drive the greatest return, and there is a misconception that the available technology to deliver this is complex and difficult, or that tools to deliver the quality they want don’t exist. This is no longer the case.
Secondly, it’s about measurement of success. Most B2B marketers are KPI-driven and again want to focus their energies on where they can demonstrate ROI into their organisation. With controlled outbound activities, it’s traditionally been easier to do that.
So, with that in mind, how can marketers rectify this and up their personalisation efforts?
Marketers need to look at their entire customer journey and identify their gaps first, then explore which gaps are the most important touchpoints – the ones that have maximum impact in the buying process.
Equally, they should be focusing on the buyer journey of their most valuable buyers first. That’s why ABM personalisation is so key.
Certainly at Webeo, we see the website being a major part of the gap and have built our solution to facilitate closing this.
Everyone knows you can tailor an email to an individual, but in what other, perhaps not previously considered, ways can marketers personalise their marketing efforts?
So personalisation isn’t going away and, even with our own marketing efforts in Webeo, we’ve seen a step up.
As a vendor of business website personalisation, we’re obviously going to say the website first. It’s also because it’s the touchpoint 71% of B2B buyers say is most influential when making a buying decision. It’s the place a buyer goes at the start, middle and end of every purchase, and it’s almost shameful that we’re neglecting this in our efforts when it’s so easy to do and makes such an impact.
Staying with the inbound focus, personalised livechat and pop-ups are driving great results for our clients. This can be as simple as suggesting content relevant for their industry in livechat, or even different pop-ups as they move around the site, right through to referencing funnel stage of key interests they have shared from your CRM data.
We’re also seeing personalised video used brilliantly both in email and on websites and landing pages, particularly in ABM. The power of seeing something created specifically for you is huge and leads to conversions as high as 30%.
Is there a danger in being ‘too personalised’? Can personalisation cross the line from ‘tailored’ to ‘invasive’? And, if so, how should marketers avoid this? What are the pitfalls to look out for?
I think the question we always have to ask ourselves is why are we personalising. Gartner addresses this really well in its 2019 ‘State of personalisation survey’, where it discusses the different types of personalisation available. It talks about ‘recognise me’ personalisation – show me you know who I am – and ‘help me’ personalisation – help me find what’s important to me. Gartner explains that ‘help me’ based personalisation is 16% more powerful than ‘recognise me’ based.
I think if it’s not being used to support the buyer and is simply a statement of ‘we know it’s you’, then it’s pointless and I understand why some people would say this is invasive.
How do you think the pandemic has impacted personalisation in B2B marketing, if at all?
From a positive perspective, the fact that the whole world has gone digital has really forced marketers to up their game with regards personalisation across the board.
We can’t rely on face-to-face events and meetings like we used to, so we’re asking ourselves ‘how can we deliver as close as possible to this experience, but digitally?’.
From the data side, we can’t deny that working from home has had an impact on IP matching, particularly on smaller businesses who don’t use any VPN connection. However, we’ve also seen the IP data providers respond with more powerful AI and the rate is slowly creeping back up. This is where integrations are also playing a huge part, as businesses can use the unique tracking IDs in their MA platforms to personalise not just at business level, but at individual level too.
And how do you think this will evolve in 2021 given the year we’re just concluding? What should marketers keep in mind in their efforts to be hyper-focused in their targeting?
I don’t believe we’re going to return 100% to the old non-digital ways, and marketers have to get to grips with creating more personalised experiences that get as close as possible to the one-to-one experiences we used so much of prior to Covid-19.
When they do embrace the creation of these personalised experiences, it’s about combining obvious quick wins with insight. While there are things you can do very quickly that will resonate with your buyer, do your homework in terms of understanding what is really important to them and that ensure you focus on delivering it.
Finally, what advice do you have for marketers looking to introduce greater personalisation into their outbound or inbound marketing? Are there any resources they can use, or any golden rules they absolutely must follow?
Always run an AB split test on any personalisation you do so you can understand what elements are working, and then continue to test against the control you have created. With any personalisation, always consider how this is going to help the buyer. Are you giving them access to the information they need and desire more quickly? Are you showing them you understand their challenges and responding to them with the right content?
If it requires a great deal of effort to deliver, but you can’t identify why and how this will make your buyers life easier, then don’t do it.
