Kathryn Strachan, Managing Director and Owner of Copy House
Personalisation is often overlooked in B2B marketing, with many marketers still failing to recognise that humans make up a business.
Unlike B2C markets where a single consumer thinks and acts for themselves, in a B2B environment there are often multiple people acting together on behalf of the business. They are not as impulsive in their purchasing decisions and they have their own personal motivators in addition to the business’ needs and wants.
So, what’s a marketer to do?
Hone in on the core challenges as a starting point. As B2B audiences are acting on behalf of the business, B2B marketers should first focus on overcoming the challenge of how to build better, more meaningful relationships with their target audience. To do this, they must establish what their customers’ pain points are and specifically cater their content towards them. Hence the importance of a personalised approach.
Statistics show that 77% of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe that personalised content is great for building stronger customer relationships within the B2B market. With this in mind, 72% of B2B customers have said that they expect personalised experiences.
If that wasn’t convincing enough, 55% of B2B marketing professionals also added that personalisation can increase conversion rates and promote growth.
So why do so many B2B marketers stray away from this?
The easy answer is that creating a ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing approach is often simpler and all round easier. It requires minimal effort and creativity, while the reverse – following a business through each and every step of its journey to understand what drives the people behind the brand – is time-consuming and requires considerable research.
A simple way to save time when designing personalised marketing strategies is to use Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI powered tools can gather and assess data whilst also monitoring trends and patterns of the company’s audience. Technology-enabled personalisation is incredibly fast, accurate and often free of errors. Using AI can alleviate a marketer’s workload, giving them back more time to plan more personalised campaigns and strategies for their audience.
The Introduction of BERT
In 2019 Google launched its new endeavour: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, also known as BERT. This new algorithm was said to impact 1 in 10 Google searches. Essentially, this means consumers who are browsing the internet will find content more relevant to their search. Although BERT is far from perfect and has not mastered every human enquiry, it is exceptionally great at breaking down complex text and providing a simple targeted answer to a user’s search.
When it comes to content marketing, if B2B marketers fail to produce great content that is personalised to their consumers’ needs, then algorithms such as BERT will not consider their solutions as relevant to their prospective customers’ inquiries. This means the likelihood of B2B content reaching their target audience is extremely low.
Because so many people skim-read portions of text, search engines have taken notice and begun to rank sections of text separately on Google. This is done hand in hand with BERT as the Google algorithm will first understand what the consumer is typing and then rank content accordingly. If content is clear, precise and personalised, they are more likely to be highly ranked by Google and therefore drive more traffic to businesses’ websites allowing them to benefit from greater lead generation.
Personalised Marketing is a Step in the Right Direction
Although the impact of personalised marketing is underappreciated in the B2B sector, technology advancements and statistics show that it is easily scaled, more successful and should be something considered by more B2B marketers.
Studies suggest that 42% of B2B marketers agree that they need to invest in implementing personalised content strategies in their marketing plans, however they have not acted upon this.
First understand your audience, create content that they genuinely want to consume, lean on technology and AI, and continue personalising as you learn more and more about what works.