Thanks to a boom in new technologies, B2B website personalisation is finally gaining some traction. But what are the common objections when starting a personalisation initiative?

Why B2B website personalisation is important

Imagine you’re in a room of 100 shoe salespeople, and they’re all shouting “BUY MY SHOES” (as a shoe salesperson does, obviously) – where do you look? Who do you go to first? Now, imagine one of the shoe salespeople shouts your shoe size. You now have somewhere to look.

(Also, try saying “imagine one of the shoe salespeople shouts your shoe size” 10 times.)

It’s a super-simple example, but personalisation in marketing works against the same core concept. In a crowded marketplace, if an individual feels a solution meets their specific needs, they’ll look in that direction first.

In B2B advertising, certain forms of personalisation are commonplace. Your LinkedIn outreach or content strategy may be based on reaching specific job functions in companies of a specific sector, for example. You spend time creating assets and content that map to that specific type of prospect, and target your advertising to only reach that group. You’re tailoring your assets to appeal to a subset of your overall audience. That’s a form of personalisation.

What tends to get ignored in this process is your website traffic. It’s almost certain that your largest audience, across all of your marketing channels, is your website. It generates magnitudes more eyes on your brand and services than your advertising campaigns, but for some reason, this huge, captive audience on B2B websites tends to be overlooked as a campaign channel for personalisation. A website is the face of your company online – your salesperson when a salesperson isn’t available – so it seems odd that this is such an under-developed area.

The issue may be that, to this point, many website personalisation technologies and strategies have been designed with a consumer audience in mind: a captive audience of repeat buyers, or users who log in to an account and purchase or view multiple products. Think Amazon recommendations, or the “you might like” tab on your Netflix account.

Most B2B websites don’t have the traction or frequency of use to allow this kind of behavioural personalisation. Many of our clients’ websites (and this is true of both the multinationals and regional SMEs we work with) share similar user behaviour – a 15% returning visitor rate, and an average number of pages per session of around two. This means for the vast, vast majority of their largest, most engaged audience, they have a single visit and two pages in order to present the most relevant information to users. But this is exactly the reason why personalisation is so important to the modern B2B website – you have limited time to capture that visitor’s attention.

Say you offer services to companies in multiple sectors. We’ll go with retail, utilities and manufacturing. You have pages on your site that talk about your sector specialisms.

Three users arrives at your blog via organic search, one in the retail sector, one in manufacturing sector, one in the utilities sector. You’ve got two pages at most to show them that you are experts in their specific sector. How do you do it without overwhelming them with choice, or making your site look like a badly organised jumble sale table of professional desperation?

You personalise. Bring the information most relevant to that user into their line of sight.

Thankfully, technology vendors are catching on, and there are a slew of B2B personalisation tools on the market: Webeo allows you to use the Lead Forensics database to personalise your website to anonymous users based on their sector, company size and other firmographic information. Demandbase allows you to utilise personalisation in your ABM strategy, and most automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo and Eloqua (via Oracle Maxymiser) will allow you to personalise your website for known visitors utilising your owned data.

Tactically, personalisation can be used in any number of ways, so we’re not going to drill down into detailed use cases or examples (this is a much bigger topic that we will save for another day), but if you’re interested in such things, check out this article from Evergage.

Why companies avoid it

“It’s creepy and weird”

We hear variations of this argument a lot (put in a more professional way). And yes, it can be if you’re doing it wrong. The point of personalisation should be to help your prospects and customers find the information they’re looking for, or is most relevant to them, as quickly as possible. It’s not supposed to be used to throw every last bit of information you have about a visitor at them, in a misguided attempt to convince them that your website is conscious and wants to be their friend.

Don’t be too heavy-handed – a design which shouts ‘WE’RE BEING PERSONAL’ is likely to have the opposite effect – take this example for our website. Say we had your name in our automation system (and your name was Barry) and we know you had looked at a lot of content related to website personalisation, we wanted to test if showing you content about website personalisation would increase your engagement. Should we present something like this?

Or something like this:

The idea is to take the information you know about someone and say “this person is most likely to be interested in information related to…” and make it as easy as possible to find this information without terrifying them.

The technology headache

59% of B2B marketers claim that a lack of technology is what’s stopping them from using personalisation techniques. This is likely due to the issue we discussed above, with B2B personalisation technologies being in their infancy, but we also feel it’s to do with two other big issues: the overwhelming amount of marketing technologies currently available, and an increased amount of hesitancy to invest in a new stack. It’s too complicated, too expensive and too risky. Just two things to think about here:

1. It’s likely that you already own a technology that can enable some form of personalisation
2. If you don’t, you can find a technology that will allow you to test your personalisation for almost no cost (some are even free)

There’s something of a hangover in the industry when it comes to new marketing technologies, lots of companies are waking up to the realisation that they invested in an enterprise-level automation system some years ago, and now that the dust has settled and the smoke has cleared, they secretly know that they might as well have just used MailChimp (if you’re in this position, don’t worry – lots of companies are).

But your existing marketing tech stack likely does a lot more than just “send better email”, if you’re using Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua or Pardot, you’ll be able to utilise these tools to enable a personalised website experience of some description (some features are more advanced than others) without having to invest in any new technology. It’s just the strategy you need to get right.

But if you do need something new, there are plenty of options that aren’t monolithic drains on your budget and resources. Technologies are available for companies of all sizes, and they’re easier to use than ever. If you fully understand what you’re trying to achieve, spend a short amount of time looking, and you will find the right tech at the right price to suit your company.

(Not to toot our own horn, but if you’re thinking of trialling a personalisation experiment, we’re well placed to advise you on your technology options – hello@bernandgray.com.)

Lack of resources

A similarly large number of B2B marketers claim a lack of time (or staff) stops them from using personalisation techniques.  Often, we find this is an issue with over-reaching with your expectations of personalisation, or setting a strategy that is 18 steps ahead of where you should be starting. Start small. Test it. If it works and it’s cost effective, expand your use. There’s no need to suddenly decide “WE’RE PERSONALISING EVERYTHING” and developing a gigantic plan that will take a small army to execute.

In a lot of cases, personalisation technologies should be used to REDUCE the amount of resources you need.

Say you’re running a campaign where you’re targeting 3 different sectors with the same content. We know companies who will produce 3 different landing pages, and filter audiences via direct targeting. With a personalisation technology like Webeo, you’ll only need to build one landing page that can deliver 3 different messages to those 3 different audiences. Plus, the underlying template will give you a generic, catch all campaign landing page that will appeal to anyone outside of those 3 target groups. So you’re running campaigns to 4 different audiences, all through one asset. Hooray!

Lack of data

It might feel like you simply don’t have the volume of data to make this worthwhile. In the recent “Audience and Demand Planning Benchmark Survey” from DealSignal, around 60 percent of respondents said that they lack confidence in their data coverage. Sometimes, this is absolutely true, but in our experience, most companies will likely have a wealth of untapped data at their fingertips that they aren’t even aware of. You’ll likely be surprised by what you have the ability to do with what you already

Google Analytics, your CRM, your automation system. Add in an IP identification solution like Lead Forensics or Kickfire and you have all the information you need to start a personalisation experiment. The key is understanding if your segment size is large enough to personalise for (or in an ABM context, if the value/potential revenue of the account is worth investing in a personalised experience).

Personalisation is for B2C companies

No. Personalisation is for people. B2B buyers are people, and they behave like people. B2B buyers expect that same level of personalisation,  just in a different context. They’re looking for a frictionless buying journey that’s relevant for them and where they are in their decision making process. Ultimately, B2B buyers are generally time poor, and they’re looking for information as quickly and easily as possible. If you can’t provide it, they will look elsewhere (think about how many times you’ve been looking for information on a vendor’s website, couldn’t find it, then ended up somewhere else).

“The majority of marketers (87%) report a measurable lift from personalization. Half (54%) experience a lift of more than 10%, while 13% report a lift of over 30%.” (Source)

Bern & Gray is a boutique agency specialising in designing, implementing and deploying account based marketing, personalisation and martech strategies for clients in B2B and professional services. If you are looking to understand how website personalisation can help your organisation, contact us at hello@bernandgray.com