With all the misconceptions surrounding personalisation in B2B marketing, Kavita Singh shares managing director at Webeo, Kirsty Dawe’s insights to discuss the importance of relevance.
Personalisation (n.): The action of designing or producing something to meet someone’s individual needs. In B2B marketing, this means segmented messaging at scale.
Kirsty highlights the ‘individual’ part of the definition because many marketers fail to tailor messages to the individual decision makers in their B2B campaigns.
Kirsty asks: “If personalisation is utopia, then how can we bridge the gap using technology so that, at some point, we will get to creating those great experiences for those individual decision makers within our campaigns?”
True personalisation requires the customer or prospect to share some personal data about themselves, so there’s often a waiting game that B2B marketers feel they can’t be involved in. For example, if you want to personalise your website, you’ll need to wait for a prospect to interact in a way that you can capture cookie based information. And this presents a challenge in itself because B2B buyers aren’t always comfortable sharing their personal information all the time.
Why personalisation gets a bad name
And thus, why personalisation gets a bad reputation. You don’t want to use that data in an inappropriate way; otherwise, it’ll be labeled as creepy, But Kirsty explains the reason it’s creepy in the first place is because this form of personalising is lazy personalisation.
“I think as marketers, we need to take responsibility for how we use that data to give personalisation the reputation it serves because it can really enhance the journey for the audience that we want to work with, or it can also really put them off. We’re just doing something like using their name or using their business name, instead of really thinking about how this personalisation could be helpful to that business that we want to work with.”
There are two types of personalisation, according to Gartner, that can be really useful.
“The Recognise Me” : This means you know who your audience is, along with some information about them. You might see them talk about a piece of content that they downloaded. So if you’ve seen that they’ve had a certain behaviour and are particularly interested in one topic, you communicate with them through channels and show that tailoring the messaging can work.
“Help me through the buying journey” : You’re making it easier for prospects to get through to that purchase to get all the information that they need to get there. And you’re reassuring them at every stage, making them less anxious about making the wrong decision. You’re giving them something really useful about products and services that they didn’t know that will help them in their purchase process as you direct them to a product or a service. Additionally, this means rewarding customers, by providing them with messages around exclusive benefits that are based on the information you know about them.
Staying relevant
She says: “For both of these personalisation types, help can be extremely helpful. By focusing your energy less on personalisation for the sake of personalisation, you’ll be able to reshift to how you can personalise to make everything really relevant for your customers.”
Relevance (n.): the quality of being directly connected with, and to something else.
Using data for relevance means trying to understand your customers. You’re connecting that information to your company to create relevance, which is the first step towards personalisation because you can do relevance at scale.
Additionally, if you’re going to personalise, don’t forget about your personas. Go back to your personas, from a relevance perspective and again, think about what’s important. Think about what your buyer has said, what will be useful for them and what key challenges they still face. You can translate that into relevance based on your online experience, instead of pushing out data that you already know about them.
With that being said, Kirsty broke down three key technologies that can help personalisation efforts significantly.
AI based chatbots
When chatbots are combined with either IP-based data or behavioural cookie data, all of a sudden you’re creating a really intuitive customer journey for your audience. Chatbots really do work because it gives that human-to-human experience more than ever.
Kirsty says: “I can tell you prior to lockdown, most of my conversations were via WhatsApp, and that’s how buyers like to communicate. They’re intuitive. You can use the IP data to direct them to what’s most useful in their buying stage. Relevant offers reassure them with relevant case studies, and make the sales process easier and less confusing within that conversation by driving to the right place.”
Visitor behaviour tracking
Kirsty recommends behaviour tracking as she uses Hot Jar for her own tech stack. It’s useful for looking at clients, especially with a web view and seeing what parts of the personalisation efforts are working. It gives a clearer picture of how users can move on the pages of your website, where they’re lingering, and where they’re quite turned off.
Once you see trends in a customer’s journey, you can analyse what is working to try to replicate these techniques. By purchasing a software like this, you’ll be able to uncover the roadblocks in the buyer journey to create a much smoother path.
Dynamic Yield
While Kirsty says this is more suitable for B2B ecommerce, it can be very powerful. This means creating behavioural based content. Dynamic yield analyses a buyer’s data when they’re on site so you see how they move through the site and what they are looking at. Then, it matches that back against previous buyer journeys.
They then can serve content and product recommendations accordingly, so it can cite which content is valued and what products are purchased.
“Always think about segmentation that makes sense for your company. If you’re personalising, think about who your prospects are and focus on relevance and personalisation for them. Then you can move through and prioritize experience for them. Don’t do too many things at once, when you start, let it run for periods of time before you get to statistical relevance. If you have low traffic on your website, you’ll need to give it time to prove it’s working before you measure. Once you give it time, you can measure and create control and start to make changes. So make those initial steps to relevance, and then you can start personalising, prioritising and measuring after.”
