Five tips for creating hyper-personalised B2B marketing campaigns

In today’s data-driven business world, marketers can’t avoid hyper-personalisation if they want their campaigns to be successful.

Hyper-personalisation describes the use of customer information to provide more personalised and targeted products, services and content. However, even in 2015, this concept is still difficult for B2B marketers to realise. So what can you do to add that personal touch to your campaigns?

1. Know your audience
Ask yourself: who are you targeting? Take a look at the customer data you have available, from basic information such as company location, type of industry and number of employees, to more advanced information such as spending patterns and digital body language. But, it’s nearly impossible to analyse all the customer data you have available. The trick is to identify and segment the most valuable data that supports your campaign, and analyse it in bite-sized chunks. Tesco learned in the early days of its Clubcard scheme that analysing 100 per cent of consumer data is not feasible, instead the supermarket could just study a 10 per cent sample of customer data and still achieve between 95 and 99 per cent accuracy. 

2. Content is king
Once you have identified who your customers are and what information they need from you, it’s time to design a scalable content plan. However, basic personalisation which utilises simple customer information such as name and job title for outbound direct marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. Customers or prospects, especially in the B2B world, expect marketers to present them with information that is relevant to their business, the problems they are trying to solve and their stage in the buying cycle.

3. Learn from successful B2C brands
There are lots of examples of how B2C businesses successfully employ hyper-personalisation for their campaigns. Why? Because many of them have built their business on scalable technology centred on their customer relationships. Netflix, for example, analyses over 30 million video plays a day. In order to ensure a hyper-personalised service delivery, it also tracks customer behaviour including pause, rewind and fast forwarding habits, user ratings, searches, geolocation data, viewing times, device information and social media feedback. In short, it builds up a complete picture of its customers which it can use to improve the campaigns it delivers to them. As a B2B marketer, look out for these innovative ways of understanding and engaging with customers, and see if a similar approach could also work for your campaign.

4. Internal collaboration
B2B companies, however, often struggle to achieve the same level of one-to-one engagement as their consumer counterparts, due to a reliance on traditional marketing strategies based on inefficient legacy IT systems. This technology tends to hold customer information across a number of information silos, which are often disconnected and owned by different business functions. Organisations still employing this model will find that multiple customer touch points are disparately distributed throughout the business, not communicating or collaborating in any way. The result is a patchy picture of the customer. Marketing leaders therefore need to connect and collaborate with all areas of the business in order to utilise the data at their disposal to build better analytical capabilities and produce actionable customer insights, which can be applied in hyper-personalised campaigns.

5. Scale it up
Great customer experience begins with understanding exactly who your customers are, but doesn’t end after one hyper-personalised marketing campaign. If you want to build a strong ongoing relationship with your customers, you need to understand how they behave at every stage of the customer journey – and apply a hyper-personalised approach throughout. One of the first steps to unlocking the value of hyper-personalised campaigns is to map the customer journey. Effective mapping should look at the paths of individual customer segments and create an optimal set of potential experiences for them, whichever path they take. And remember: these journeys do not end at the point of purchase. They last for as long as the customer says they will – meaning it is more important than ever to place customers at the epicentre of any hyper-personalised marketing strategy.

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