When it comes to the B2B sector, web personalization is the area to focus on. Personalization allows you to tailor your website to enhance its relevance to individual visitors, improve user experience and increase the chance of conversion. As consumers, we now have the option to shop around. We’ve grown accustomed to checking other local stores in the area or even placing an online order to get the best deal. 

Personalization is one of the only ways to make your brand stand out from the competition. More than 78% of consumers will only engage in offers if they’ve been personalized to them based on prior interactions with the brand.  Additionally, 87% of those surveyed say that personally relevant branded content positively influences their brand feelings and that’s all the more reason to amp up your personalization efforts.

What is B2B Personalization?

Using B2B personalization involves customizing your communications, offers, and advertising to suit the needs of each of your B2B consumers. It should not be confused with customization, which though similar, is initiated by the customer rather than the brand. It relies on the user for action, thus detracting from the customer experience.

Consider the following:

Personalization Differences Between B2B & B2C

The main difference between B2B and B2C personalization is the fact that there are multiple decision-makers in B2B companies. You may not always be dealing with the person who makes the final call about which product or service to use. To protect their bottom line, companies often seek multiple vendors to research to ensure they can get the best possible deal in terms of quality and price.

Compared to the B2C space, sales cycles are often longer, which means there’s more content to create and personalize to keep prospects interested and moving through the funnel. It often requires additional effort because effective personalization must go beyond messaging.

Another key difference is that B2B customers are often overwhelmed with options and choices. They aren’t as concerned with customization as they are with receiving the information they consider valuable, helpful, and actionable.

Why You Need B2B Personalization

B2B customers are people who seek to build relationships and work with a company they trust and respect. Personalization can go a long way toward helping your company establish rapport with prospective customers.

B2B customers usually consume massive amounts of content before making a purchase decision. The more content you create and make available when they need it, the better off you’ll be against the competition. Use a variety of content types, such as webinars, white papers, and infographics to complement your blog posts. Each piece of content should aim to address any number of obstacles your B2B buyers face.

If your business serves multiple verticals, for instance multiple industries or multiple sized companies, the content on your website must be adjusted so it positions your company well for each market. Your cold prospects are going to need a different message than your warm prospects. So, your ads, emails, and website needs to adapt to each lifecycle stage of each customer.

If you have a Dream 100 customer list (make one if you don’t!) you should personalize every interaction for those key accounts, from your LinkedIn outreach to your account-based marketing (ABM) landing page.

Tips for B2B Personalization at Scale

Make Data the Foundation

Without data, you’re stuck guessing about the next course of action to take. On the other hand, simply collecting all the data you can get your hands on isn’t the right approach, because you’ll need to sort through and analyze the data to glean insights from it.

When creating a personalized experience, you’ll want to rely on the data you’ve collected to drive your personalization strategy. You should collect this data:

  • Demographic data: This is information about your target customer – such as age, gender, profession, etc. Collect names, emails, job titles, and locations. The more your sales team can learn about prominent decision-makers, such as the vice president, or the chief marketing officer (CMO), for instance, the better.
  • Firmographic data: This is data points about the company, similar to demographics, but for the business rather than the individual. Collect company names, company size, revenue, industries, stage in the sales cycle, etc.
  • Behavioral data: This refers to the actions people are taking while they’re on your website, such as the pages they are visiting, the links they click on, how long they’re on the site, etc.
  • Contextual data: This is the data, such as the type of device they are using, the browser they are using, the time of day, day of the week, etc. that provides context for the actions the visitors take on your site.

Clearbit, a data marketing engine, makes it easier to understand your customers, find new ones, and personalize all your interactions. Proof integrates seamlessly with Clearbit to feed your data into Experiences in real-time. To learn more, request information. Right now, you can trial Proof’s personalization product, Experiences, for free.

Segment is another customer data platform that deeply integrates with Proof to send and receive visitor data in real-time to make it easier to personalize your website with events such as (Industry) and (CompanyName), and so on.

Automate

Using Experiences, it’s possible to personalize your existing site without coding. It allows personalization for each of your target audience segments based on behavior, events, traits, and more. 

ShipBob used Experiences to build a personalized content journey based on how a visitor behaved on their site. As a result, they got a 123% increase in content downloads on the blog, without spending additional engineering time.

BuildFire used Pulse to add inline social proof, prefill known forms, and allow visitors to pick back up where they bounced in previous sessions. The marketing team split-tested this approach from two weeks and saw a 46% increase in qualified marketing leads.

Go Social

Social media isn’t just a place to talk to your friends and family. It’s also great for listening to what people are saying about your company and finding people who are interested in buying your products or services. 

Build a social media presence around your brand, but also take the time to establish a personal presence associated with your position at your company.

  • Data shows that 98% of sales reps with more than 5,000 LinkedIn connections meet or surpass their sales quotas and that 65% of people wouldn’t find a message from a salesperson creepy, as long as they had connections in common.
  • Use social listening tools to monitor conversations, conduct sentiment analysis, and spot key buying indicators, so you can reach out to prospects with a personalized message based on where they are in the customer journey.
  • Whenever you want to add a new personalization element to your website, take time to split test it to see what happens. no two audiences are the same it’s crucial to see what resonates with your specific audience and have that be your driving decision maker.