Content personalization is one of the most popular and valuable techniques of the modern-day content marketing landscape. It breathes life into an otherwise mechanical-sounding marketing email or other content forms. Gone are the days when mindless promotional emails could make the cut. According to McKinsey research, 71% of consumers expect brands to deliver personalized content. They want to associate with a brand that resonates with them the most.
Moreover, B2B companies face immense pressure when it comes to standing out among the heaps of emails customers receive daily. You don’t want to let an opportunity slip away from you, giving your competitors leverage. A study shows that a faster-growing company drives 40% higher revenue from content personalization than slower-growing companies.
Therefore, by identifying and understanding your customers’ interests and pain points, and personalizing your content to address their needs, you can build a compelling B2B content strategy.
Research suggests that 88% of consumers feel customer experience is as important as the quality of a B2B product or service. Therefore, merely personalizing an email by adding a customer’s first name is not personalization. Your customers expect more than that.
With the help of analytics, you can learn about the needs and preferences of your customers to deliver personalized content. Showing them resources or products that have nothing to do with their preferences will only turn them off.
For example, you can track your customers’ most frequently visited pages on your website, their most frequently shared products on social media, free resources downloaded by them or most-browsed products to get a sense of their preferences. Accordingly, you can provide them with personalized content in the form of emails and text messages, or recommend similar resources or products.
Different B2B audience segments exhibit different buying behaviors, show different interests, require different levels of brand awareness, have different challenges and pain points, and come with different needs. Some may require more simplified content, while others may require a different content format.
In simpler words, different B2B target audiences can have different content requirements and there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach for B2B content creation. This is where the need for personalization fits the picture.
For example, your email content for customers who add items to their shopping cart and leave without making a purchase will be different from the email content for customers who have already made a purchase and need to be informed about more discounts on your B2B products/services. Simply put, you cannot send out a “Your cart misses you” message to people who never added a product to their cart.
Research shows that 64% of B2B marketers consider artificial intelligence (AI) a critical and valuable tool for their sales and marketing strategies. With effective AI tools and techniques in place, you can do more than quickly churning out personalized content for your B2B audiences.
AI can assess and analyze the content preferences of different B2B audiences and provide content recommendations to suit each audience segment. AI can also help create personalized content for different B2B audiences by tailoring it to their specific needs and preferences. Many B2B companies are using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to generate customized content for each audience segment.
Other interesting ways to use AI for generating personalized content include AI-enabled A/B testing and chatbots.
B2B companies can use AI to test different content versions to assess which performs best with different B2B audiences. This can help identify which types of content are most effective for each segment.
You can implement AI-powered chatbots to engage with your B2B audiences in real time and provide them with personalized solutions or address their queries based on their needs and preferences. B2B companies with large volumes of customer inquiries can benefit from AI-based chatbots.
Per the behavior of your B2B customers and their previous interactions, we recommend creating a user-friendly landing page. By tracking the most frequently browsed pages of your customers, you can create a “Recommended for You” section or “Continue Browsing” segment, which directs them to the page that is most relevant and meaningful to them.
It all comes down to creating a breezy customer experience that avoids a cluttered landing page and reflects specifically what the user wants to see.
White papers are educational tools meant to be downloaded by customers for information and knowledge purposes. They contain content, including infographics, that can be related to a product or service but are not promotional in nature.
By providing such content to your customers, you show them that you are going an extra mile to ensure they have all the information they need on a particular subject. It’s a two-way street where your customers can use your resources to learn, and you can remove the hurdles in lead conversion.
Whenever a customer signs up on your website, sending them a personalized welcome message is a meaningful and thoughtful gesture. However, simply welcoming them to “the family” is not enough. You also need to provide a guide or detailed instructions for a product or service usage.
You can also take it up a notch by being willing to address the questions they may have as a new user of your products or services. In such a way, you encourage future interactions and make them feel that they have everything that they need to start out.
Customer feedback is the most enriching form of information. With customer feedback, you can get insights into what your customers want from your brand in terms of content and how their experiences with your content have been so far. You can use this information to further improve the overall customer experience.
You can collect customer feedback via questionnaires or surveys for detailed analyses of several aspects of your content. You can create a type box where users can write about their concerns and grievances at length. Such feedback builds trust in your customers, making them feel that their inputs are valuable to you.