Hyper-personalisation is trending, but how can B2B brands get it right? Jessica McGreal investigates
Forget about generic marketing campaigns, boring ‘batch and blast’ emails, standardised DMs and expensive tradeshows. Instead the time has come to focus on ‘hyper-personalisation’. This approach looks at making marketing relevant to the individual, rather than the masses. There are differences when it comes to definitions though.
Steve Grout, CEO of digital agency Tangent Snowball, says: “Hyper-personalisation just seems like a buzzword for what good data driven marketers do anyway. Basically it’s about collecting useful information to deliver relevant personalised messages through email or on site to customers.”
Grout touches on the basis of hyper-personalisation. But it’s more than just a buzzword. It’s a call-to-arms for marketers to take personalisation further.
“It’s about trying to recreate the cosy familiarity of the local shopkeepers of old, who always remembered what paper you read, what type of milk you prefer, the names of your children, which football team you support and so on,” says Matt Simpson, group content director at Zone agency. “The information is then used to make your shopping experience easier and better.”
How it works
Hyper-personalisation is a smarter way of marketing and works by drawing information from audience data via a raft of technologies, such as CRM and marketing automation.
Sean Jackson, CMO at EXASOL, explains: “Fast analytics are the key here. But not just analytics; you have to make sure you can access multiple data sources, ingest data at fast rates, ensure the data can ‘talk’ to each other and then get cracking with analytics. Lots of people are talking about the internet of things, where every dumb object is becoming smarter, collecting and emitting information on a whole host of things.”
Jackson goes on to explain how this is relevant in the B2B world: “The internet of things has allowed production lines to serve up a wealth of smart information, therefore allowing manufactures to offer their customers the right product, component or service at the right time.”
Using these data insights marketers can categorise prospects by their purchase history, wants and needs. After the data is examined and customers are segmented into different persona groups, marketers can begin getting creative with targeted campaigns that are more likely to resonate.
Donald Stuart, CEO of Brainstorm mobile, adds: “It’s important marketers react to the outcome of previous campaigns, using information generated from each customer to build a new, more personalised approach. This insight can be used to build a profile for each customer that will be contextualised and personalised, which when put together will help stimulate a positive response to the promotions and build greater brand alliance.”
Hyper-struggle
However, hyper-personalisation isn’t without its challenges. Implementing such a customer-centric approach needs manpower and technology, which means money. As a result, many brands are still struggling to harness the real power of personalisation. The B2B Barometer Report by the BMC and IDM highlights just this. While 92 per cent of B2B marketers segment their market data, just 38 per cent carry out needs-based segmentation to make true personalisation possible.
These worrying statistics show that for many organisations this form of marketing remains a pipe dream. A further study by Exact Target and Forrester illustrates one reason behind this struggle: expense. While 84 per cent of marketers believe personalisation directly impacts customer retention and loyalty, 48 per cent still face challenges and plan to increase budget to overcome these issues.
Yet Kristian Bannister, web UX strategist at Brandwatch, argues that money shouldn’t be holding brands back. He says: “It is time consuming, but if you’re doing it right, you can quite quickly prove ROI. With online advertising and social media output, you don’t have to spend a lot before seeing results and whether things are going the way you want them to, at which point you can tweak your campaigns to get them right rather than analysing them in the aftermath of a big spend.”
Is anyone actually doing it?
Despite cookies helpfully allowing brands to track customer journeys around the web and placing well-targeted ads at every available opportunity, few brands are actually carrying out real hyper-personalisation successfully. To ensure you get it right here are a few of the companies doing it well:
Dojo is an iPhone app that helps Londoners find interesting and unknown places to eat, visit or party. Late last year, the founders chose to stand outside London Underground stations during the early morning rush-hour to hand out typed letters to commuters.The letter explained the creators had quit their jobs to launch this app and would be standing outside train stations every morning handing out the pieces of paper to hopefully ensure people download it. This approach to marketing was refreshingly simple, but different.
This direct approach is reflected in its weekly emails. Signed off from Georgie, a member of the Dojo team, the emails are fun, quirky and most significantly personal. Previously, the start-up has even used the recipient’s name to create a rhyme in the subject line. For example: ‘Jessica, Jessica you’re no replica!’ This creativity is impressive and certainly must have taken a significant amount of time, but is a sure-fire way to secure your email is opened.
Adam Smith, head of media strategy at Dunnhumby, offers clothing brand Paul Smith as another example of a B2C brand getting it right. He says: “Paul Smith do it very well using their CRM to immerse their customers in the brand via personal invitations to a variety of exclusive events and launches. This makes their customers feel special and important, building long-term emotional affinity.”
Yet, it’s not only consumer companies that are experimenting with hyper-personalisation. “Whether you’re B2C or B2B the principles are the same: it starts with the ability to identify, collect and audit relevant data,” explains Simpson. “That doesn’t necessarily mean just your customers’ transactional data, but also their social, search and browsing behaviour, plus potentially all kinds of contextual data.
“But it’s not just about having the data, it’s what you do with it. That’s when it starts to get exciting: a website that ‘sees’ you coming, a timely geo-located text, customised content on a third-party channel, an auto-switch on of live chat for high churn risk customers and so on.”
Cloud and computer hosting service Rackspace is one brand following Simpson’s advice. Its website tracks users’ movements and initiates live chat with prospects based on the products they have been browsing.
The company strengthens this personal bond with customers via digital and social campaigns that communicate its brand story. In January the brand hit 6000 employees, known as ‘Rackers’. To celebrate it released a video tracing the company’s journey, the footage showcased its founding story through a variety of clips from between 1998-2015. The film humanised the tech brand, while celebrating success with internal staff and customers.
In addition, the Texas-based firm’s social media profiles reinforced its customer-first attitude. As well as offering advice and interesting content to over 80,000 Twitter followers, the brand utilises its social networks to directly deal with customer issues, both positive and negative. Its social streams are packed with compliments thanking them for their customer service.
Gideon Lask, CEO of Buyapowa, explains how organisations can take this a step further: “‘Social commerce’ offers an even bigger opportunity to personalise your marketing communications. There is no better way to personalise an offer than by asking your customers to co-create it. So instead of trying to guess what your customers want why not ask them to tell you. You could ask them to vote for a deal or package they want.”
Meanwhile, Fujitsu is a massive B2B brand that has ditched traditional marketing strategies to focus on account-based marketing (ABM) and a big part of this is personalisation. The company now spends less money on cold lead generation activities, including email, telesales and DM to focus on more targeted campaigns.
Simon Carter, executive director of marketing UK & Ireland at Fujitsu, details how the brand encourages its staff to use ABM: “Every member of the marketing team has an account allocated to them in addition to their day job. We have trained everyone and have created a portal and asset library, for each ABM-er to dip into for ideas; we have created templates, both for the initial ABM plan, but then also for the specific accounts themselves; personalised collateral, review summaries, CSR ideas etc. We have best practice guides, run ABM clinics for people that are stuck, and have a discussion board to share new ideas and successes. We have also introduced ‘ABM-er of the month’ to celebrate those successes.”
An example of the brand’s hyper-personalised approach is highlighted through its relationship with military customers. Officers are trained from an early age to write hand-written letters, as a result a proportion of event invitations and follow-ups are hand written and mailed. In addition, the company engages directly with individual stakeholders and acknowledges those who make the Queen’s Honours List in this way instead of sending impersonal mass emails. This, in turn, builds closer relationships with key influencers and leads to sales.
Beyond hyper-personalisation
While personalisation offers a rich opportunity for B2B brands, it shouldn’t mean ditching all other marketing activities.
Robert Ainger, marketing director at The Marketing Practice, reminds marketers: “Hyper-personalisation does make sense in B2B marketing but needs to be supported by a platform that engages the wider audience of influencers and future prospects.”
Smarter, personalised campaigns that address your most significant buyers and prospects should definitely be part of your marketing strategy in 2015. Yet, in order to succeed it’s essential these bespoke activities run alongside more general brand awareness initiatives.
Brands also need to be aware of overdoing it when it comes to personalisation. Joo Teoh, managing director of Ampersand Mobile, warns: “I don’t think I want to be reminded constantly that someone else knows what I have done and can presume to know what I will do. There may be moments I will appreciate it, and there will be moments I will not appreciate it. The difficulty is that no amount of modelling is going to get that bit right all the time.”
There’s obviously a fine line to tread between success and failure when it comes to hyper-personalisation. But, undoubtedly it’s not all hype or even a just a buzzword – it’s now essential.
