In today’s digital marketing landscape, personalized marketing experiences can make or break a brand’s success. A full 80% of customers say they would rather buy from brands that send offers or content that’s highly personalized to them. On the B2B side, research reveals that buyers are typically 57-70% through their buying research before contacting sales, while nine out of ten buyers confirm that online content has an impact on their purchasing decisions. This puts personalization at the forefront of both the B2B and B2C buying experience.
There’s great potential in the realm of personalized marketing, but there are plenty of challenges too. Customers have high expectations, and they expect brands to deliver a consistent experience based on the factors that actually matter to them. That means marketers have to identify the right data points to find patterns in customer behavior and then create a custom experience that speaks to their wants and needs.
Marketing personalization has come a long way, and in 2024, we expect to see even more focus on tailored marketing experiences that are driven by data and consumer behavior. At GANI Consulting, we’ve outlined how marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs can use the power of personalized marketing to get ahead. Read on for our insights and actionable steps to take toward better marketing personalization.
Understanding Personalized Marketing
Because we spend so much of our time online, consumers naturally want to enjoy the digital experience as much as possible. When it’s successful, personalized marketing delights customers by acknowledging their individuality, anticipating their needs, and delivering a smooth experience with a human touch.
Let’s start by defining personalized marketing. It’s much more than using a customer’s first name in an email—it’s a smart strategy that uses data and behaviors to inform a customer’s marketing experience with the brand.
Personalized marketing encompasses everything from product recommendations and tailored promotions to celebrating a customer’s milestones with the brand. Personalized marketing builds a relationship between the customer and the brand by providing relevant, positive touchpoints that aren’t limited to the transaction itself. These extra touches make the customer experience feel unique and intentional, creating a positive association with the brand before the customer even makes a purchase.
But personalized marketing isn’t just about making the customer feel special—it also has an impressive ROI. According to McKinsey, 78% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases or refer friends and family to companies that personalize their marketing.
The success of personalized marketing extends to the B2B space, where buyers and sellers alike have come to expect a hybrid approach to the buying journey. The days of in-person meetings aren’t over by any stretch, but curated digital touchpoints are an important piece of the B2B buying process. McKinsey reports that the number of channels B2B buyers use to engage with their suppliers has more than doubled in recent years. In 2016, B2B customers identified a total of 5 channels they used during the decision journey, compared to 7.5 channels in 2019, and 10 channels in 2021. As technology advances, so do the channels marketers use to reach customers, including comprehensive YouTube channels full of detailed video content, and chatbots deployed across platforms including Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Amazon Echo X
A modern full-funnel approach incorporates personalized marketing that makes it easy for buyers to get relevant information for their stage of the buyer’s journey without having to sort through information they don’t need. There are plenty of tools available to personalize the marketing process across any industry, like incorporating AI-powered chatbots to offer an instant self-service resource that’s available 24/7.
Content marketing platform Uberflip takes things even further. By using multi-touchpoint data, Uberflip creates custom microsites specifically targeted to each customer, taking personalization to a whole new level and greatly impacting the sales cycle of B2B businesses. In addition to making the buyer’s journey smoother, these tools can also help sellers scale their efforts for more sustainable long-term growth.
Implementing Personalized Marketing in Your Business
Buyers expect similar levels of personalization in the B2B buying process as they experience when buying from retail or consumer brands. Forrester predicts that B2B ecommerce will grow by 10.7% annually over the next five years, making the competition even stiffer and the need for personalization even greater.
Building a personalized marketing strategy starts with data. Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the practice of data analytics, breaking down massive amounts of data in real time so that sellers can understand customer behaviors, preferences, and patterns almost instantly. Sellers can then take those insights and create highly personalized marketing content that feels custom-made yet still allows for scalability.
In the B2B realm, marketers can start the marketing personalization process by segmenting their audience by factors like industry, organization, role, and stage in the buying journey. The B2B buying process involves detailed research, layers of approval, and rounds of negotiation that can often be streamlined with more precise targeting throughout the buying process. Marketers can allocate specific pieces of content to the appropriate player within each segment, so the right information reaches the right decision-maker at the right time.
After audience segmentation is complete, B2B personalization can take multiple forms. Automation tools like Adobe Marketo Engage can work to drive conversion across channels by triggering reactivation campaigns for inactive users, sending SMS or email reminders to complete a purchase, offering custom product recommendations based on browsing history, and much more.
Performance Max campaigns from Google Ads offer another practical tool for AI-driven marketing personalization. Marketers enter their conversion goals and audience signals in a single campaign, and Google’s automation capabilities will serve up top-performing combinations of brand assets to customers with the highest likelihood of conversion. Combined with solid marketing content, these automated tools give marketers even more leverage to reach consumers in a way that translates to greater conversion rates and strong ROI.
Uberflip allows marketers to curate content for every step of the buyer’s journey. Customer data is leveraged to create content Hubs, or personalized microsites featuring dynamic content recommendations like blog articles, social media posts, videos, and eBooks in a streamlined interface, followed by multiple CTAs compelling the buyer to take next steps.
The Impact and Importance of Personalized Marketing
Though personalized marketing has great potential, the B2B industry has traditionally struggled to implement it. Customers expect to be seen and treated as people, rather than personas, and investing in personalized marketing fosters a stronger connection with customers for lasting relationships.
Salesforce reports that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, and yet only 51% of customers say that companies generally do understand them. Companies that personalize their marketing efforts well can bridge the gap between expectation and reality, winning more customers who are likely to repeat their purchases.
Customers are far more likely to engage with content that’s relevant to their current stage of the buying journey. The marketing content creation platform Turtl found that personalization increased customer engagement with content by 34%, and bounce rates dropped by 49% when content was personalized.
The effectiveness of personalization increases as the depth of personalization increases. McKinsey reports that companies who excel at personalized content see 40% more revenue from their efforts than companies whose personalized content performs at an average rate.
Personalization also has the power to reduce customer acquisition costs by 50% and increase marketing ROI by 10 to 30%. In a B2B context, marketing personalization delivers the personal touch that customers have come to expect while moving them through the funnel more efficiently with targeted content.
Consumer Trends Driving Personalization in 2024
Consumer trends are just as important in the B2B space as they are in the B2C or D2C realms. Today’s consumers don’t just expect brands to personalize their experience—they prefer it.
The overall trend towards marketing hyper-personalization extends to the B2B space, with consumers expecting companies to anticipate their needs and shape their journey accordingly. In fact, 76% of consumers reported feeling frustrated when they were met with generic content that wasn’t tailored to their needs.
An increased awareness of data privacy issues also affects the way consumers interact with brands in digital spaces. Zero-party data, or data that a consumer freely shares with a company, gives personalized marketing an additional edge. This builds an atmosphere of trust by allowing the consumer to consent to sharing their data to improve the experience, while simultaneously increasing their conversion odds through hyper-personalized content. And since 54% of consumers say it’s harder than ever for a company to earn their trust, it’s especially important to approach issues of data sharing and privacy in a way that respects the consumer’s autonomy and shows a dedication to transparency.
In the vein of personalization, consumers also look for AI-powered product recommendations to inform their buying decisions. This can include using AI to optimize and rank search results based on consumer input, offering custom product catalogs with personalized pricing, or simply recommending items that are typically purchased together. Just like retail shoppers, B2B buyers want to know what products come with a strong recommendation for their specific needs so they can make a more informed decision.
Best Practices for Personalization in 2024
While personalized marketing has incredible potential to drive revenue and sales, it’s important to strike the right balance to keep consumers engaged without overloading them. The goal of personalization is to offer everyone the experience that’s most relevant to them, which means marketers need to carefully consider how they deliver these personalized experiences.
Marketing personalization is most effective when it happens in real time. Zero-party data is especially useful for creating dynamic experiences, since it collects preferences straight from the consumer. Companies can build content paths tailored to the data points they’re collecting from consumers to lead everyone into a funnel that’s built to address their needs. AI-driven solutions can respond to consumer behavior instantly to deliver an experience that captures their attention and offers value.
Consistency is key in personalized marketing, just as it is in any marketing strategy. Companies that take an omni-channel approach to personalized marketing should take advantage of marketing automation tools to ensure that consumers have a cohesive experience across their website, email, personalized offers, and any other touchpoints. This is especially important for B2B marketers, who are typically targeting a team of multiple key players in different roles across the organization.
A/B testing personalization strategies can give marketers a powerful means of measuring how the strategy performs and allow them to adapt the experience accordingly. It’s important to A/B test with intention and isolate smaller components, like email subject lines or the placement of call-to-action buttons, and to test individually for clear results.
Personalized marketing has earned its place as an essential marketing strategy, but ultimately, it’s a strategy that’s still evolving as technology and consumer practices change. In the meantime, companies can lean on personalized marketing to connect with consumers while building trust, creating lasting relationships, and streamlining the buying journey. Considering the meaningful effects of a positive consumer relationship on conversion rates and revenue, this growing strategy is well worth the investment.
About GANI Consulting
As a people-first organization, GANI is dedicated to taking a vision and transforming it into long-term, measurable results. We’re a team of marketers, creators, and dreamers with a shared passion for bringing ideas to life. Through targeted partnerships with clients, we work to define goals and milestones, plan strategic projects, provide consultation, and share the rewards. Reach out to a member of our team today to learn more about how our data-driven approach can make a difference today.