80% of customers said they were more likely to buy from companies that offered personalized marketing experiences, and the same study supports that 90% of customers found personalized marketing appealing.1 Do these stats place your brand behind the eight ball or ahead of the game?
Today’s saturated marketplace shouldn’t discourage companies from making meaningful impressions on their target audience. Once you have defined buyer personas, digital personalization gives you the ability to connect with customers, anticipate their needs, and build long-lasting business relationships.
The Importance of Digital Personalization in B2B Marketing offers perspective on why personalizing your marketing strategy to your audience is an investment that will continuously yield ROI for your company.
Here are some of our favorite ways to implement digital personalization aligned with your company.
Tactical Considerations for Trends Worth Adopting
Digital Personalization: It Doesn’t Take One Shape
It’s easy for a customer to feel like another metric lost in the shuffle in today’s expansive and highly automated marketplace. Digital personalization sets out to avoid this common mistake.
Customers love personalized marketing content because it makes them feel seen and appreciated. Here are some examples of how you can provide personalized content to your audience:
- Use customers’ names in emails and other promotional outreach
- Gather an understanding of individual customer buying/purchasing habits
- Geographically target customers – local customers may have specific needs that you can cater to
- Leverage ‘You May Also Like’ content to offer suggestions based on their search or purchase history
- Use predictive search – this auto-populates text in your website search bar for a helpful experience
- Follow up on how to best utilize products/services that they have already purchased from you
- Use email segmentation to send email blasts centric to customer industries and interest3
Chatbots: The Road Most Traveled in Successful Conversational Marketing
Chatbots are powered via AI (Artificial Intelligence), and though not human, they can simulate a person-to-person conversation, offering help in the same ways that humans could. Chatbots are increasing in popularity, becoming one of the most valuable marketing tactics, known as conversational marketing.
Chatbots are super-employees to add to your team roster. Depending on how you set up your chatbot, they can be available 24/7, and unlike customer-service representatives, they can serve multiple online customers at once and use programmed responses. Chatbots can facilitate orders and sales, answer basic questions, troubleshoot technical issues, and coordinate calendar appointments.
LinkedIn: The World’s Networking Rolodex, at Your Fingertips
LinkedIn is the watering hole of the digital business world these days, full of opportunities, widespread reach, and ongoing conversation. Use LinkedIn to put out “feelers” for prospective customers by:
- Joining LinkedIn Groups – these groups connect you with people within your industry
- Using LinkedIn Prospecting Tools – these tools offer a laser-focused approach to targeting
- Posting Regularly – this is an effective way to engage with groups, prospects, and thought leaders4
Personal Considerations for Digital Personalization
Know Your Vision
When things are personal, values are essential.
Ensure the ways you’re using personal digitalization are aligned with your company’s core values. Prospective customers who are attracted to your business ethics are more likely to work with you.
Finding the intersections of what your target audience and company care about is the fast track to crafting your company’s next highly engaging marketing plan, especially when it applies specifically to digital personalization.
Identify Desired Outcomes
Before digital personalization can revolutionize your company, you need to decide exactly what your business needs are. What are your pain points, and how can digital personalization fix them? SMART goals are always the way to go; make plans that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Then improve through customer feedback! Gathering feedback from your customers and organizing it into a SWOT analysis will provide direction for your SMART goals on where you may need to pivot and what could potentially be revised in your digital personalization approach.
Respect for Privacy and Personal Information
Transparency is mutually beneficial. It fosters trust, maintains accountability, and protects confidential information. Have a solid, steadfast approach to protecting the privacy of your customers to prevent potentially adverse events from occurring.5
What to Expect
Entrepreneur Peter Reinhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Charm Industrial, summed up digital personalization best, stating, “Personalization, which was once only offered by the world’s most cutting edge companies, is now a basic expectation for [customers]. They want the brands they interact with to be available on multiple channels and to remember who they are, where they’re coming from, and what their preferences are… Put simply, in today’s world, brands that cannot deliver true personalization will lose customers and revenue to those that can.”
With this in mind, managing your expectations is vital to keeping momentum and letting the new strategies you set in place put their efficacy into action! All things considered, not if, but when you see the positive impact of digital personalization on your pipeline, you’ll be glad that you invested the time and resources into tailoring your marketing tactics for your audience.
Get started with digital personalization now.
Sources:
- https://www.epsilon.com/us/about-us/pressroom/new-epsilon-research-indicates-80-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-make-a-purchase-when-brands-offer-personalized-experiences
- https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210602005287/en/Personalize-or-Perish-New-Data-from-Twilio-Segment-Shows-Customer-Loyalty-Hinges-on-Personalized-Experiences
- https://emarsys.com/learn/blog/what-is-personalized-marketing/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrydevries/2021/12/16/10-trends-for-digital-marketing-in-2022/?sh=315e5f45755a
- https://www.blastanalytics.com/blog/digital-personalization-trends-2022