Understanding the importance of relevancy is one thing; generating the information needed to create those personalized experiences is another. Given the demand for highly targeted outreach and content, marketers are increasing their reliance on various data sources to help hyper-personalize buying journeys from start to finish.
“Intent data can predict early signs of interest from new target markets and accounts, even prior to initial brand engagement,” said Carmen Goldstein, Head of Global Strategy & Campaigns, Growth Marketing for Unity Technologies. “We also complement intent data with first-party account data to unlock accounts with high purchase potential. Intent data is as important during post-sale to predict cross-sell/up-sell opportunities and prevent churn by identifying customer interests beyond their purchase.”
Specifically, research shows that marketers are no longer utilizing simple demographic or firmographic data to personalize assets. Instead, they’re collecting deeper intelligence on buyers, such as buying intent insights, timeframe for buying decisions, specific commentary on challenges/pain points and budget information — all of which starts at the beginning of a buyer’s journey.
Mason explained that instead of forcing a prospect to read a generic article that’s somewhat applicable to their pain point or industry, organizations should incorporate guiding questions in interactive content to better provide prospects with the information they need. This goes all the way through to the conversion stage, with proposals that push people over the line. Beyond that, he continued, is creating evangelists and promoting customer success with something as simple as personalized onboarding documents.
Without the proper tools, the experts agreed that data collection processes can easily turn into a nightmare if there’s not an appropriate tech stack powering them. With such an abundance of data at their disposal, marketers are ensuring they have efficient means of sorting through it and identifying relevant insights.
No one’s going to sit there and sift through all these different data points from multiple accounts, so you need platforms and systems that automate it for you,” said Methananda. “You can already see this automation trend happening with predictive functionality; there are platforms that act like automated SDRs, designed to analyze different flows based on a target’s responses.
