The Importance of Personalization in B2B Marketing

JonCarlo Hernandez-Lopez

The Evolving Landscape of B2B Marketing

In such a data-driven world, consumers now expect highly personalized experiences tailored to them. Personalization in B2B marketing is just as crucial since B2B buyers have also become conditioned to expect this same type of personalized communication. Organizations often struggle to define an audience-centric view of the role of personalization that extends throughout the customer lifecycle.

Defining Personalization in the B2B Context

What is B2B Personalization?

B2B personalization refers to the process of customizing your advertising, offers, and communication strategies to align with the unique requirements of individual B2B customers. This approach involves precise targeting and a deeper understanding, enabling the delivery of expedited, highly relevant, and anticipated experiences to your business customers.

How and why B2B personalization differs from B2C

A B2B purchaser is very different from a B2C shopper. B2B sellers need to segment registered users by their company or industry and their role within the buying organization.

Personalization by the buyer’s industry is also an important tactic. For example, a manufacturer of motors will want to show different products and content to a lawnmower maker than to a company that produces warehouse conveyer belt systems.

Source: Marketingcharts.com

Why Personalization Matters

Personalization goes beyond adding a few personalized elements in your strategy. It includes delving into your audience’s pain points, challenges, and aspirations, then tailoring your content to directly address these aspects. By demonstrating your thorough understanding and empathy for your audience, you establish a bedrock of trust that sets the stage for meaningful interactions.

B2B merchants must continue to adapt personalization to the B2B context. Unlike in B2C, it’s not a buyer’s personal preferences that matter in B2B but what they need to do their job efficiently. They must tailor content and options to the buyer’s role and to the kind of company they work for.

Benefits of Personalization in B2B Marketing

Having a personalized B2B marketing strategy truly impacts ROI. According to monetate.com, 79% of business that exceed their revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy. It’s evident that including personalization in your B2B marketing strategy can lead to a multitude of benefits, including:

• Improved Customer Engagement
• Enhanced Lead Generation
• Higher Conversion Rates
• Stronger B2B Relationships

Adobe’s “2023 B2B Commerce Growth Strategies Survey” showed that 63% of B2B ecommerce companies are investing in improving their user experience by adding new personalization features, but 40% of small companies say personalization will be a major challenge for them.

Actionable Tactics for B2B Marketing Personalization

Get Started with Your Website

Your website is one of the best marketing assets you have. On your website, you can control everything, from branding to content and messaging, and you can leverage this asset most effectively in a B2B space by using personalization. If employing personalization into your marketing strategy, you should alway make your website content personalized to the B2B visitor, so there’s no question that it solves their business problems.

Leveraging technologies like Google Analytics 4, SEMRush, and Google Search Console can uncover key opportunities where you can deliver content that suits your audience’s specific needs and also serve as a catalyst to drive sales further. By understanding how users are finding your website and what actions they are taking, you can tailor the web experience to their needs to deliver the best customer experience as possible.

Furthermore, you can use your website to guide customers through the buyer’s journey by creating tailored landing pages that target your buyers at specific points in the B2B conversion funnel. These personalized landing pages should convey product benefits and specific information depending on different user personas and preferences Lastly, optimizing your website’s flow can guide your buyers through their journey to take an action or convert in one session.

Asana is an excellent example of this. Their homepage immediately delivers a value proposition above-the-fold, then leans into their different audiences in the next section titled “See how teams use Asana”. It’s within this section that audiences are quite immediately segmented and signals the start of the conversion funnel. Each audience segment receives tailored messaging based on their needs and interests, and the content is personalized to the audience well.

Source: Asana

There are customer logos that are relevant to the industry and build trust among the buyer, statistics based on the industry that the audience is in that further show the value of the product,  case studies of past and present buyers that are relevant to the audience’s industry, integrations into specific platforms that the audience is likely to also use, and much more. Utilizing this account-based marketing approach allows Asana hyper-target their audience personas based on business-related attributes.

Take it Further with Email Marketing

A strong B2B email marketing strategy is proven to be one of the top ways to nurture leads, but businessses often overlook or misuse email marketing in their organization. You can’t just put together one email and send it to your subscribers expecting to have massive success. Similar to your website content, email marketing communications should also be personalized to the buyers’ needs and interests. According to 99 Firms,“personalization [was] the top strategy for 47 percent of B2B marketers in 2020”.

A simple to leverage personalization in email marketing is to take a one-to-one approach like legal service platform. Rather than sending out generic emails, try to create a campaign where you send out a personalized email from a familiar face. Either the CEO, or someone on the team who is client-facing. Even better if the email “sender” is someone who has already made contact with the buyer.

Audience segmentation is key to a successful personalized B2B email marketing strategy. Similar to your website’s content, you’ll want to make sure the emails you send to your buyers are tailored to their needs and expectations. Effective email segmentation, can have a positive effect on campaign performance, email delivery, and your brand’s image. Audience’s can be segmented in a variety of ways, including:

• Demographic data
• Behavior
• Interest
• Position in the B2B marketing funnel
• … and more!

Not only can audiences be segmented by one of the above, for hyper-tailored targeting, you can segment audiences using a combination of multiple strategies listed above. Combine strong audience segmentation with a CRM and your personalized B2B email marketing strategy will increase email performance and move buyers forward in the buying cycle.

Consider integrating a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for better-tailored email marketing. Using a CRM tool can allow you to target specific individuals or groups of customers with custom-tailored emails based on analytics, monitored customer online activity, as well as click through rates. Successfully integrating a CRM into your personalized email marketing strategy can lead to:

• Improved Customer Segmentation
• Automated Workflows
• Better-Personalized Email Campaigns
• Increased Email Engagement
• Enhanced Lead Nurturing
• Better Sales Performance
• … and more!

It’s not surprise that personalization is an important piece of a successful B2B marketing strategy, especially considering B2B personalization in email marketing has improved click-through rates by an average of 14 percent and conversions by an average of 10%. Combining personalization across multiple marketing channels like your website and email marketing is only two of the many ways you can leverage this tactic in your digital marketing strategy. Personalization can even be leveraged across digital advertising and social media, too.

Conclusion

Personalization in B2B marketing is not just a trendy buzzword; it’s a fundamental strategy that holds the key to success in the competitive B2B landscape. By tailoring your marketing efforts to the unique needs, challenges, and preferences of your business customers, you forge deeper connections and build trust. This, in turn, leads to improved customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and stronger, long-lasting relationships.

In an era where customers expect tailored experiences, embracing personalization is not an option—it’s a strategic imperative for B2B marketers looking to thrive and grow.

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