In B2B communications, personalisation is crucial. An ABM strategy IS a personalisation strategy, an end-to-end exercise in tailoring content and communications, often down to a single person.

B2B buyers are swamped with communications from noon ’til night. That’s a problem: if we poked you with a thousand pins, you wouldn’t like it much, and you’d likely become pretty desensitised to it by the end of the process. How many of those messages have really got through? How many have made a meaningful impact? Communication that works is that which strikes a real chord; in a world of pushpins, a broadsword stands out. Stronger, bigger, more impressive messaging that can’t help but connect.

Generating tailored advertising, bespoke offers, and personalised communications makes your business stand out to those that matter. Doing it well is a question of getting smarter with your targeting, and understanding your market to the extent that you can offer faster, more relevant and more expected experiences to your customers. Give the people what they want.

Why is this important?

There’s a temptation when producing B2B communications to think business-first, but that’s the wrong way to go about it. You’re not marketing to businesses, you’re marketing to people.

Imagine that there’s no longer a solid line between B2B and B2C. Pretend they’re essentially the same process. If that were the case – and it basically is – you wouldn’t hesitate to offer your B2B customers the same level of personalisation as you’d offer to B2C. The truth is that you’re not firing your comms at some faceless business: there’s a real person (or persons) on the other end. That person is a decision maker, someone with the same emotional triggers and cues as a B2C consumer, but someone who wields far more power; a negative reaction from that one person equates to a negative reaction from that business as a whole.

B2B customers expect their needs to be understood. They want relevant suggestions, they want their problems to be anticipated, and they want that when you reach out – not when they reach out to you. Even if they didn’t expect it, it would benefit your brand to implement personalised communication.

But getting it wrong can be creepy and weird.

Why personalise?

Personalisation is optimisation. The process of refining your communications enables you to discover and deliver the perfect message, target those customers that really matter, reveal the channels that work best for your communications, and generate a real-time dialogue with potential clients and customers.

This is unquestionably something B2B clients want. The stats back it up: Monetate’s research suggests 79% of businesses that exceed revenue goals use personalised communications, and Salesforce’s 2018 ‘State of the Connected Customer‘ report says 72% percent of business buyers expect vendors to personalise engagement to their needs. Worryingly, few are getting it right, because only 27% of B2B customers say companies excel at meeting their experience standards.

Let’s do it.

One custom email isn’t going to cut it. A personalised campaign needs to be widespread and varied, and there are a huge number of components to get right.

Define your audience

Account based marketing starts by defining your audience. What this audience is, exactly, depends on your definition of ABM, and how you understand it works. As we’ve discussed previously, there are multiple forms of ABM, and multiple ways to define what an ABM strategy is.  Broadly, we define an ABM strategy as any B2B marketing approach that is filtered through a set of named companies, rather than broad firmographic targeting like sector, job type or function.

If you’re hyper-targeting via ABM, you need to know exactly who you’re targeting it to. An  If we’re considering B2B on a parallel to B2C, using your data to create and develop desired personas makes a lot of sense, and indeed it makes the task much easier and more effective. Like broad firmographic targeting, you’ll be pick out the locations you’re targeting, the level of seniority (or, crucially, buying power) within the company, the size of the company, and the pain points you’re really looking to solve, but with an ABM approach, you can look at a level of detail more

With this information on hand, creating personalised content which drills down to the specific industry and their unique issues naturally follows.

Personalising your advertising

With global digital ad spend nearing $350 billion, there’s no question that this is both a massive market and one that’s highly crowded. To stand out, you need to know who you’re targeting and what you’re targeting them with. We’ve used this before, but imagine you’re in a room of 100 shoe salespeople, and they’re all shouting “BUY MY SHOES”  – where do you look? Who do you go to first? This is exactly what being a B2B buyer is like – everyone is sending the same message, thinking they stand out, many aren’t thinking about the dozens of other companies also competing for their attention. Now, imagine one of the shoe salespeople shouts your name, or even your shoe size. You now have somewhere to look.

It’s a super-simple example, but personalisation in advertising 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.

Apply the right targeting techniques and your communications can narrow from a generic ad to one aimed at a broad audience, and from a broad audience to a micro-targeted or even 1:1 recipient.

The right ads boost conversion rates and engagement. Audience segmentation can increase CTR significantly and even save you per-click money. But the ad itself is only one level of the funnel – crafting the post-click experience to match the message or audience you’re pushing for is crucial.

Personalising your website

A quick in-and-out visit to your site does you no good. What your prospects find there is important, because if it’s something they like they’ll be inclined to stay; the longer they stay, the more likely they’ll take action.

We discuss this more in this post: “Is B2B website personalisation creepy and weird“, but in short – website personalisation is the biggest untapped opportunity for B2B organisations to really turbo-charge their lead generation. Because the user experience for B2B buyers is significantly different to a B2C customer, website personalisation has been difficult to implement at any scale to this point, but the technologies are catching up. B2B website personalisation is now a very viable, effective strategy for generating conversions.

It’s up to you to make your content suit the B2B visitor, and convince them quickly that it’s the answer to their problems. You can customise your calls to action to target specific B2B needs, repurpose content you already have on hand into a more attractive or digestable form, or refine your entire web offering to match the market you’re targeting – be that a segment, persona, account, or an individual lead.

If you can automate that personalisation to show content based on demographics, interests or history, you’ll deliver the right message by default. This has a secondary benefit, because using the right tools to analyse the metrics your site can offer – seeing who’s visiting, for how long, and what they’re looking at – gives you valuable insights to drive future communications.

Personalising your nurturing tracks

Generally what most people think about when we talk about personalisation. Once a user is inside of your automation system, you then personalise your outreach.

This tends to take the form of “personalise the email to the individual”, so you’re automating “Dear <subscribers name>” in the body, but personalistion is more than this. It’s using the information you have about the subscriber (their sector, which services they’re interested in, the type of content they enjoy) in order to make sure they’re receiving the right message at the right time.

This means thinking about your orchestrated communications in a non-linear fashion.

Over 50% of business recipients say they receive marketing emails that don’t apply to them. We’d argue that number is probably lower than the reality – it’s been proven that one-to-one personalisation can boost transaction rates and ROI, but the opposite is certainly true too. Email material needs to go further than using the recipient’s first name, and make it clear that your business understands both what they need and how it can be fixed. Ensuring you provide adequate communication throughout the customer journey is another must: it proves you’re paying attention, and is a convincing way to engender trust.

Watch the signals, too. Keep an eye on your social media metrics: if someone has just changed roles, they may be more inclined to make a bold decision. More traditional B2B tactics work here, too: hiring patterns from a company could indicate a period of investment, for example.

Social media

Many businesses engage heavily on social media platforms – it’s possible to take this too far, but a chatty, friendly and helpful social voice can help make your business seem approachable and, yes, social. You’re flipping the B2B/B2C conversation the other way; decision makers wishing to do business on a personal level may be more inclined to work with yours.

However you direct your campaigns, using positive and personal language – using ‘you’ rather than ‘your business’ – anchors your communication to the decision maker.

It should be clear by now that B2B personalisation is not just valuable – it’s essential. Strengthen trust, generate authentic relationships, make your business relevant, and conversion rates will rise. And maybe you’ll make a few friends along the way.

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