It has been quite a time for Content Personalization to become a point of discussion among B2B businesses. Many businesses have employed different strategies and gone through different growth curves. The key point is that Personalization is just like Data. It works for a business only when handled and executed correctly. Surveys conducted among businesses shows that over 60% of businesses reported average growth of 5-15% when implemented Personalization in their strategy. 33% of Businesses reported neither a gain nor a loss with the personalization strategy. Though, this survey was conducted among companies who implemented this strategy. Still, there is a larger section where personalization is new and not in operational mode.
Why Personalization is not easy as it seems?
When everyone knows that Personalization is going to boost their revenues, what is stopping them? Lack of technology and knowledge resources are the two most contributing factors for most of the business. Even for the business that used the personalization strategy, it did not work every time.
This shows that there are more things to be aware of with a personalization strategy. The first step to start implementing the personalization process begins with a well-defined model of capturing and classifying data. The more segmentation of data, the more it is easy to reap rewards in the latter stage.
Elements of Personalization
There are different stages in a buyer’s journey when the marketing strategies and gives multiple opportunities to personalize the strategy more often than average. But, the study suggests that companies with 81% of personalization were not much ahead of those with 21% of personalization.
The key element resides in how you personalize it. What type of content is getting personalized and how it is delivered to your audience. True answers to these questions lies in understanding the market and audience as much as is possible. Analysing the captured data and turning it into actionable steps with personalized content builds a strong base for marketing campaigns.
Common ways to Personalize
As said, different brands should stick to their own personalization strategy. Here are the most used ways to personalize the content.
Vertical oriented: it is one of the easiest ways to segment the database and personalize your strategy. This does help businesses achieve their goals as for one Industry, say Recruitment Automation, the audience can relate to one type of content.
Buyer persona types: Creating a buyer persona is one of the mandatory and initial steps in the marketing process. This makes segmentation and personalization easy for the marketing team.
Buyer’s Journey Stage dependent: Some businesses only want to personalize the content for those prospects who have propagated ahead in the sales funnel. These prospects have shown interest in the product and personalizing content depending on the buyer’s journey stage for them increases the effectiveness of campaigns.
Account oriented: Account-based targeting is a common technique in B2B Market. Accounts related to a prospect organization are targeted and content is created accordingly.
Lead specific: It is the highest level of personalization which is most effective but also costly at times. Targeting an individual profile and personalizing the content ensures that the chances of conversions are increased.
Measuring the effectiveness of Personalization
With different objectives and different methods to implement the strategies, measurement also comes in a custom format. Creating the metrics is a tough task but the understanding of the audience and objectives makes it easy. For some businesses, increases impressions is a win for some of the clicks on the button.
Consumption: Measuring the content views, downloads of the pdf or report are the top metrics when businesses try to measure the content consumption part.
Engagement: The average session of a user on the website, conversion rate and sharing metrics tell you about engagement from the content.
Financial: Getting the required number of sales inquiries or direct online sales signifies the value of personalization with financial targets.
B2B Industry has affirmatively recognised the importance of personalization to make their content more relevant for their buyers