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We discussed the following three pillars for Extreme personalization (EP)-powered modern marketing strategies:
1. Move from segments to an audience of one. To engage an audience of one, modern marketers must rewire customer engagement from batch-and-blast messaging to mass audiences to understanding individual preferences. Modern brands are integrating AI-based real-time marketing capabilities into their existing marketing automation stacks.
2. Unite disparate multi-channel efforts into focused cross-channel engagement. Driving for larger conversions through volume and bulk multi-channel messaging is the opposite of personalization. Today’s connected consumer is intentionally leaving behind cues for modern marketers to employ for the benefit of everyone. Now with AI-marketing automation, marketers can leave the sleuthing and sorting to the machines. These insights will lead to the development of more relevant, compelling, personalized content that can reach individuals at the right time, on the right device, with the right message and through an optimized path to conversion.
3. Evolve from guesswork to scientific engagement: AI extends the capability of messaging beyond A/B testing. Intelligent automation eliminates assumption by allowing marketers to test multiple variants based on actual consumer insights. By letting machines instantly understand individual preferences, marketers are freed-up to focus on context and cross-channel experiences.
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Chart of the Day: Which personalization techniques are most popular?
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The new era in content marketing is to make content, like PDF or printed content, fully dynamic, or, as we call it: hyper-personalized. Imagine you are using field merges like you do in emails, but now you are using them for creating a hyper-personalized PDF, or printed document, exactly at the time when a contact requests this particular document. It can be as simple as your checklist, “How to prepare for the digital transformation”, carrying the company name in the title, e.g. “How to prepare [CompanyName] for the digital transformation”.
Using specific rules can result in all sorts of variations with regard to text elements, images, charts, statistics, quotes, etc. You are using real-time information at exactly the time when your content is requested in order to hyper-personalize it. Another advantage is that your content will be always in the most recent layout, style, and branding, since all you need to do is to update the layout template in the background, while the actual content will be produced upon a download request.
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Some marketers lack time, people and money, while others don’t have the right tech
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Despite the wealth of customer data available - or perhaps because of it - marketers continue to struggle with personalization. That's the word from Sitecore; their global study finds that while most (79%) marketers believe personalization is a priority, they continue to struggle in analyzing data and putting it to use.
Perhaps more dangerous - consumers already believe there is bad personalization out there. They believe brands are using out-dated information (59%) or that brands 'make assumptions' about what customers want (54%).
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Here are five tips.
1. Talk to the customer and listen
Ask how they do things to achieve a goal, and look for gaps. Listen more than you speak. If you can't talk to the customer, listen in on sales calls.
2. Lean on your sales team
They are closest to the customers, and no one knows customers better. Work with Sales to understand customer pain points, challenges, and other information you can use to personalize content and marketing programs.
3. Send third-party content
It's not just about you: If you want to build a relationship, don't just send stuff about yourself—especially during the trust-building phase. You want to appear helpful and resourceful, so the more content you send that's not about you, the better.
4. Treat everyone like a buyer
Companies doing account-based marketing (ABM) are identifying these people through back channels and networking. Thus, everyone has to be treated like a potential buyer. If you think someone is in a large account you're targeting, you have to lay out the red carpet and make them feel like everything is there just for them—the content you're sending, the messages on the website, etc.
5. Use technology to support personalization
The ability to interact with people in a personalized way at scale is driven by tech, and there are tools that can help with many pieces of the job.
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Content personalization can drastically improve user digital experiences by combining marketing automation and content management.
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The patience for “spray-and-pray” emails is continuing to shrink, and sophisticated B2B buyers are increasingly expecting and demanding relevant and targeted messaging.
In EDRM’s Voice of the Customer research, 73% of the B2B customers surveyed agreed, “For brands or vendors to successfully engage me, they must have a deep understanding of my needs.” The research also showed 66% said they “expect all of [their] interactions with brands or vendors to be personalized.”
Fortunately for B2B marketers, new advancements in real-time data analytics, AI and machine learning are making advanced segmentation and personalization possible, even across complex industries and buying groups.
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60 per cent of enterprise B2B marketers are using a DAM but only 23 per cent are actively using a content marketing platform to support their editorial processes. Net, just over half even have a tool to managed their valuable content assets and a very small number have codified processes that happen in something more formal than an excel spreadsheet and email.
Atomic content and personalisation is only possible if we, marketers, shift our mindsets, build some new skills and use the tools available to us to attend to the care and feeding of our content library. A few months ago I wrote a very nerdy post about metadata and attributes. It sparked a lot of conversations about how hard it is to do this today. But trust me, it’s getting easier. More tools – some CMPs and some re-imagined DAMs – are making it simpler to store and retrieve assets. The infusion of artificial intelligence (AI) into some of these systems will augment work done by marketers and creatives – taking the drudgery out of tagging and unlocking the value in our content – even making recommendations about which assets may work best for a given situation.
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Some examples of common audiences B2B companies personalizing for:
• Exact company match (tracked via IP address)
• Industry (e.g., automotive, finance, retail, travel, as highlighted in the Citrix example)
• Visit a specific product page
• Visit pricing page 2x times and do not convert
• Read content from a specific blog category (i.e., inferring that visitors who read 5+ articles from the Retail blog category are in the retail business)
• Geographic location
• Role (e.g., VP, director, manager, decision maker, individual contributor)
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Here are three areas where leading reps distinguish themselves:
Smarter targeting. Social media platforms offer rich demographic information, and the smartest sales pros are using it to segment “likely buyers” into “buyers who are ready to buy now,” capitalizing on something that yesterday’s sales pros could only dream of: intent signals. These signals, which include job changes (people are more inclined to make bold moves when they enter a new role), social posts (an indicator of top-of-mind questions), and hiring patterns (an indicator of investment), help sales pros know when it’s time to reach out. Sales pros can use social media features like advanced filters and lead bots to further facilitate the process of identifying qualified leads.
Better understanding. A recent survey found that 80% of buyers don’t believe that the salespeople they deal with understand their business. When salespeople start the conversation with a tried-and-true opener like “Can I ask you a few questions?” they reinforce this perception. By contrast, leading sellers tend to open with “I noticed that you’ve been thinking about…” How? They’ve followed social media threads to prepare for the face-to-face meeting long before it happened. Part of asking the right questions is understanding who’s on the buying committee, which is particularly challenging given that 6.8 people are involved in purchasing decisions, on average. Since buyers have next to no tolerance for vague questions fired off by the uniformed, the sales pro who can most quickly get to the heart of the matter with every decision maker typically wins.
Closer engagement. Twenty-three percent of deals go dark because reps fail to engage buyers through the entirety of the sales process. When sales professionals are unable to provide ongoing value, the buyer feels no obligation to maintain a dialogue. On the other hand, when connections are made through a trusted mutual acquaintance, a buyer often feels obligated to stay engaged longer. And once contact is made, the best sellers use technology to gauge whether the information they’re sharing with a buyer hits the mark. Tools like email tracking and PointDrive allow sales reps to see where a buyer digs in and what a buyer ignores, providing a feedback loop. They can then use that information to tailor future interactions.
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1. Merge Data Silos To Show A Full Customer Picture
2. Understand Which Insights Matter
Too often, marketers categorize buyers by demographic or other broad segmentations. But every customer is on a unique journey with a brand. In order to nurture individual relationships - and uncover what customers want before they even know it - you must capture and accurately read buyer signals.
3. Employ The Right Tech & Processes To Leverage Insights In Real Time
Having the right automation technology in place is how you can trigger compelling, real-time targeting that manual processes would never make possible.
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Marketers are doing these two things wrong
1) They treat personalisation as the objective instead of a tactic designed to achieve the objective
2) They lead with technology, not with strategy
A personalisation planning template, from objective to tactics
1. Determine the objective
2. Develop the strategy - a) Reward me
- b) Remind me
- c) Recognise me
- d) Recommend for me
- e) Support me
3. Choose the tactics. Overt versus covert personalisation:
Overt personalisation shows the recipient clearly that the email is meant for her and her alone by including data such as name, location, behaviour, purchases, recommendations, etc.
Covert personalisation is subtle, appropriate when an in-your-face approach could turn off customers – they might not expect you to have that data on them, for example. The covert approach allows you to send highly personalised messages without crossing the line into unexpected (creepy) personalisation.
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"In the rest of this article, I will share with you a basic process you can use to build upon. I was looking for a sexy and memorable acronym to serve you but couldn’t find any that didn’t sound lame. So I will give it to you as is: - Define your goals and KPIs
- Do both quantitative and qualitative research
- Identify, select and prioritize segments to target
- Prioritizing your segments and experiences
- Design and orchestrate experiments
- Measure and iterate"
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When Brian Anderson first messaged Charlie Liang from Engagio to ask for a meeting, he couldn’t predict that his email would go viral. Brian, Co-Founder of Captuvate, had heavily tailored the message…
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Instead, we must use automation to segment customer groups. This gives us the opportunity to provide smart levels of generic support, geared to a particular group, providing products, services, and support which fit in with their expectations.
In this sense, our automated processes become hidden in plain sight. We use these processes to enhance levels of customer engagement, to understand different customer groups and what they want, and to gain insight into how to turn one-off customers into loyal clients. Marketing automation doesn’t involve churning out general responses en masse; it’s a support system, enabling us to connect customers with what they need.
First of all, automated interaction with different customer groups needs to be monitored. Processes which might work one week aren’t guaranteed to work the next, and – while automation software can give us data and insight into what’s and what’s not performing well – it can’t make the changes for us. Automated procedures, coupled with personal monitoring, are the way forward. What’s more, we must understand when to interject with personal interaction; when to override automation and deliver assistance and support ourselves. Again, we learn this by keeping track of the system and by monitoring customer movements and actions.
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eMarketer: Can you talk more about this personalization platform? How does it work?
Weinstein: Imagine a customer is browsing eBay for shoes. Marketers constantly create deals—there are some deals on shoes, some on electronics and some on accessories for cars. As those deals are created, they’re placed into virtual “buckets.”
For every piece of marketing content, such as our newsletter, a machine learning model looks through all these buckets and decides that based on a customer’s browsing history, a shoe deal would be most relevant. It’s the best of both worlds—content is filled by a machine learning model selecting from deals that humans have created.
eMarketer: Why did you decide to build this platform in-house instead of buying a prebuilt one?
Weinstein: We evaluated a bunch of third-party offerings, but there were two reasons for doing this in-house. The first reason was eBay’s sheer scale. We are one of the largest marketplaces on the planet, with a billion items for sale and 167 million active buyers. Third-party solutions struggled with the scale.
The second reason was our internal decision to prioritize this work and be one of the best in the world at it. That’s why we decided we have to develop in-house expertise that will enable us to deeply understand every element of the stack, develop machine learning models and create real-time data processing pipelines to differentiate ourselves.
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We redesigned and personalized the homepage for three reasons:
- To get closer to a global maximum. We had reached a local maximum on our current site. After four years of iteration and conversion optimization, we had achieved the best possible version of the existing design. New A/B tests on the page returned insignificant results. We had to design a radically different site to get closer to the global maximum with higher conversion rates and engagement. In other words, we were climbing a mountain and had reached a small hill, but our goal was to summit the peak.
- To increase lead quality. Our existing homepage was filling the sales funnel with lots of not-so-great leads. Often, people wound up in a conversation with a sales-human who was not sufficiently educated about what Optimizely had to offer. Not a good situation for the lead or the sales-human. We had to redesign the experience so that folks understood our value.
- To support account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is an approach to marketing and selling that deliberately aligns sales and marketing around a list of important accounts and delivers targeted campaigns to engage those accounts. The goal is to be highly intentional with who you sell to and nurturing those interactions with personalized content. This personalization campaign was intended to drive engagement with our target accounts.
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1. Content vs. Web Personalization
2. The Death of the Homepage
3. Segmentation
4. User Flow Optimization
5. Activation is the New Acquisition
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We have the technology. According to a McKinsey report, technology is now at a point that marketers can effectively deliver real-time personalisation. The pay off they say is improved customer experiences and ultimately, real returns for businesses.
“It can boost total sales by 15 to 20 per cent, and digital sales even more while significantly improving the ROI on marketing spend across marketing channels.”
This is where the customer data platform (CDP) comes in. CDP is a data discovery and automated decision-making platform that operates in real time. According to the report, this platform allows marketers to scale their customer interactions effectively as they occur. The platform is “gradually becoming an industry-standard concept, with a small but growing cadre of third-party platforms emerging that will soon shape the category,” the report said.
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1. Driving Inclusion of Feedback: The Customer Journey Perspective
2. Inbounding and the Art of Being A Listener
3. Targeted Individualistic Approach
4. Timing the Content Within the Marketing Funnel
5. Targeted Landing Pages – Taking Personalization to the Next Level
6. Targeted Incentives
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70% of buyers have indicated that the vendor’s website was the most influential channel in making their purchase decision. Taking this stat and applying it to personalization means that if you can make that website experience customized to the user’s stage of the buying cycle, you can rely on your website to drive user sales decisions.
A great way to start is by breaking your customer base into categories to help drive your B2B marketing personalization. The examples below are segmented by industry, size, revenue, and location. Optimizely chose this example because it’s broad and can cover a large number of customers. After choosing your segments, you can determine the needs/interest of each segment at every phase of the buying cycle, create appropriate content for each segment, and even up-sell current free trial customers.
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Here are four ways you can start today:
- Persona-lize, don’t personalize Robert Rose, chief strategy adviser with the Content Marketing Institute, suggests focusing on a specified target audience instead of an audience of one. Study the people who are engaging with your brand at various stages in the buying process, and craft detailed personas to represent groups with shared traits.
- Perform a content audit Your goal should be to determine which pieces of content you already have that can be delivered to provide value for each audience in a specific context. Pair pieces of content to certain audiences and buying stages so you have various assets available when you define the experience.
- Start small Pick one audience, and create three experiences for them: one for awareness, one for nurturing, and one for customers. Then iterate. Get an easy start by adding a slight tilt to otherwise generic content, brewing up other audience and context-specific content along the way.
- Begin with the web When faced with some sort of problem, most people turn to the Internet to conduct research before considering potential solutions.
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Extreme Personalization Is The New Personalization: How To Use AI To Personalize Consumer Engagement - Forbes
We're in...IF there's a positive business case ($$) and it's baked into existing martech.
This news comes to you compliments of marketingIO.com. #MarTech #DigitalMarketing