Did you know that 73% of 20- to 35-year-olds are involved in making purchasing decisions at their companies? In fact, one-third of them are the sole decision-makers for their departments.
This new generation of B2B buyers are digital natives, and as such, marketers must deliver an outstanding online experience to connect with them, meet their expectations, and turn them into customers.
In particular, they're used to getting highly personalised content and offers from consumer brands in their personal lives. So they expect the same level of personalisation from vendors they interact with at work.
Yet, it's not just a matter of picking up the phone and making one-to-one sales calls. With 59% of B2B buyers preferring to research online instead of interacting with a sales rep, you need to deliver a highly personalised experience through various digital channels to build relationships with your prospects.
What's Hyper-Personalisation in B2B Marketing?
Hyper-personalisation involves using big data and customer information (e.g., company size, location, industry, buyers' job titles, the content they engage with, where they're in the buyer journey, contextual data, online behaviours, buying team dynamics, etc.) to deliver highly targeted content, product recommendations, and offers that'll help accelerate the sales cycle.
A hyper-personalisation strategy considers all the interactions a buyer has with your company and uses the information to complement demographic, psychographic, and firmographic data.
It's supported by a customer data management (CDM) platform that can compile customer information collected from all channels in real-time. You can then develop a 360-degree customer profile to drive your tactics, such as determining the specific content and offers delivered to each customer.
The Benefits of Hyper-Personalisation in B2B Marketing
Even though many B2B marketing activities are now online, it doesn't mean that fostering personal relationships with your customers isn't essential. In fact, building trust with your audience is more critical than ever.
Hyper-personalisation allows you to create meaningful content that resonates with your prospect's pain points and addresses their challenges. You can also deliver highly targeted information based on their real-time interactions with your brand to accelerate them down the sales funnel.
Not to mention, McKinsey & Company found that personalisation can reduce customer acquisition costs by 50%, increase revenues by 15%, and improve the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30%.
Applying Hyper-Personalisation To B2B Marketing Strategies
Hyper-personalisation can enhance the effectiveness of various B2B marketing approaches, such as ABM (account-based marketing,) demand generation campaigns, and intent-based marketing.
With the help of AI-driven technologies, such as machine learning and predictive analytics, you can analyse a large amount of customer data and leverage the insights to optimise your pipeline.
Before applying hyper-personalisation at individual touchpoints, you should create buyer personas and examine the various stages of the buyer's journey so you can deliver the right message in the right place and at the right time.
In addition, set up marketing automation technologies to ensure that the insights are seamlessly executed across all channels. This will help you create a consistent omnichannel customer experience to build trust and accelerate the sales cycle.
Website Personalisation
Combine customer data from your CDM platform, such as preferences, industry, location, roles, purchase history, etc., with real-time browsing behaviours to deliver content or product recommendations that are most relevant to your website visitors.
You can also create a personalised content portal for registered users or customers. Not only will you be able to share highly relevant content and cultivate loyalty, but you can also learn about their preferences through their interactions with the information.
Use calls-to-action tailored to the visitors' customer lifecycle stages to effectively move them along the purchasing path, for example, by promoting a webinar to visitors in the awareness stage and directing prospects in the consideration stage to a product comparison chart.
In addition, you can use IP recognition technology to link visitors' IP data to companies and industries. This allows you to show relevant content and increase engagement even if the visitors aren't registered.
Email Marketing
Email personalisation can result in a 29% higher unique open rate and a 41% higher unique click rate compared to non-personalised campaigns. To effectively implement email personalisation, integrate a CDM platform with your CRM system so you can use 360-degree customer profiles to enhance your email strategy.
Ensure your data is current and verify that the leads come from real businesses. You can also cross-check prospects' information against public sources such as LinkedIn or use third-party data sources to enrich customer profiles.
Besides segmenting your list based on firmographics (e.g., industry, job title and role, purchasing power, and company size), you should also set up automated campaigns triggered by specific behaviours to send out highly relevant content based on prospects' interaction with your brand.
With the in-depth insights you glean from the recipients' interactions with the email content, you can identify prospects exhibiting high purchase intent to conduct one-to-one follow-up.
Targeted Online Advertising
Social media and online advertising platforms are highly effective channels for delivering a hyper-personalised experience because you can tap into a large amount of user data and various audience segments to target your content or promotions.
For example, LinkedIn sponsored post allows you to target ads based on job title, role, interest, company name, company size, industry, location, and more. You can also use contact targeting to reach prospects that are already on your email list.
In addition, use retargeting ads on search engines and social media platforms to deliver the right content based on the interactions that each prospect has with your content (e.g., product page visited), so you can stay top of mind and facilitate conversions.
Conclusion
Hyper-personalisation techniques help B2B marketers leverage both customer information and Big Data to enhance existing strategies, such as ABM, while using buyer intent data to identify high-quality prospects and shorten sales cycles.
There are many moving parts when it comes to implementing technologies to support hyper-personalisation, such as data collection, analytics, automation, and more. Working with an experienced partner can help you effectively integrate the right tools into your B2B marketing strategy and maximise ROI. Get in touch to see how we can help.