As more buyers self-navigate through their purchasing journeys, an endless number of vendors are vying for their attention in the digital realm. In addition, buyers are expecting more consumer-like experiences now that they are used to customized attention from B2C brands such as Spotify, Amazon and Netflix. This has brought a whole new meaning to the term “personalization” and the companies that use it correctly have the greatest chance at securing that sales call, and ultimately, landing the entire deal.
Personalization has evolved way beyond name tokens in emails. Today’s buyers demand content that is relevant to their specific needs, industries and even geographies. It’s up to the marketing and sales teams to deliver.
According to McKay, there are two levels of personalization: External and internal. External personalization is when a piece of content is aesthetically customized with the target’s name, company logo, etc.Internal personalization is content customized based on interests or specific personas. “Internal personalization is fairly new,” said McKay. “I think we're just developing what personalization means. And on the other side of things, how do we make personalization easier? And how do we make it less of a pain to do at scale?”
Account-based marketing (ABM) pairs well with personalization, as companies can customize specific assets to cater to target accounts and buyers. During a presentation at DGR’s B2BMX: Next Level ABM online experience, Phyllis Davidson and Nicky Briggs of Forrester shined a light on customizing campaigns for ABM programs at various levels:
This is when you're running ABM programs to named accounts, said Briggs. For example, you have a couple hundred accounts, but you don't know everything about it. You're relying on basic information, like demographics, to develop content. This is like what McKay referred to as "internal personalization."
TIBCO launched an industry ABM program back in 2018 with a small team. With a robust tech stack, they clustered accounts down into small sub-vertical segments, or a one-to-few basis. That let the company develop highly targeted display campaigns, so when an account visits the website, they get a hyper-personalized buying experience with content curated from TIBCO’s inventory for different buyers.
“They're recognizing that a casino has a very different set of needs to say, a restaurant, for instance, and so they’re only serving up the most relevant content as the recommended reading. Because of this approach, direct current engagement scores went up to 65%. And the MQL conversion rate doubled.”
According to Briggs, this is for companies that have about 30 or 50 accounts in the program and a small team. These organizations won't be able to go too deep into personalization but since they have a slightly better level of insight, they can cater the content to general needs and interests."It's important to monitor the pipeline health for each account individually and understand when key opportunities or renewals may be coming up that might require special treatment," she said.
Briggs pointed to an anonymous investment firm that caters to financial services companies. The company's ABM program was supported by one person who developed one-to-one customization to 36 accounts.
“What made it possible is that they play to their strengths and leverage their own first-party data from the analytics platform that they sell to clients,” said Briggs. “They use that data to personalize their message on social display campaigns at the one-to-one level, bringing the data into headlines.
And then they think about the rest of the buying journey, too. So, when people click on the ad to read it, it will take them to a personalized landing page with a very high-value personalized asset to encourage the accounts to engage more deeply. And this landing page will also be used in their social outreach to later insight them to a customer event or webinar. So, they're really starting to get more engaged with the seller.”
This tends to be reserved only for the largest and the most strategic accounts, where the focus is one-to-one, according to Briggs. This is the most resource-intensive and it involves a lot of new content creation." The messaging components are all completely customized because you're going to be using the lexicon and the language that that account uses.
SAP’s ABM lead worked closely with the account team to gain a deep understanding of the account and some of the opportunities for pipeline acceleration within it. She identified a suite of assets that were targeted at different decision-makers within the account to help toward this goal. SAP customized animations of the value proposition, video cards, E-books, infographics and posters that it would put up in buildings.
Everything was customized to the account’s branding, all the way down to the colors and uniforms the “characters” in the content wore that masted the account’s uniform offering. Finally, everything was delivered in local language. “Everything was deliberately designed to appeal to engineers,” said Briggs.
When asked what made content memorable enough to warrant a sales call,
of respondents pointed to personalized content that is tailored to their needs.
Source: DGR's 2021 Content Preferences Survey Report
