Your Path to Better Reach & Engagement at Scale
You know what you have to offer as a marketer is amazing and will solve your buyers’ problems – but how do you actually get them to notice?
People are getting bombarded with marketing and sales messages: ads, emails, stuff they didn’t ask for popping up in their Facebook and Twitter feeds. There’s so much noise and your buyers only have so much attention to give before they get overwhelmed or just plain tired of it all.
The answer comes from buyers themselves. They want personalization.
As buying journeys have shifted to being almost entirely online, buyers are telling us they want companies to show them content that is relevant to them.
According to Instapage:
- 51% of buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions
- 74% of buyers feel frustrated when companies don’t personalize web content
- 63% of Millennials and 58% of Gen Xers say they will hand over their data for personalized offers
These numbers pretty clearly say that personalization is the way to your buyers’ hearts – and wallets. But it’s easy to say “personalize content and offerings.” The trickier part is knowing how to do it successfully.
These are the steps that can put you on that path to standing out from competitors and engaging your buyers with relevance.
1. Understand Your Goals
The first step to any strategic marketing effort is to know what you want from it. Define what you want your buyers to think, feel, and do and how you know you’ve been successful. Some potential goals of delivering personalized experiences may include:
- Increased awareness of your brand
- Collecting new contacts to nurture
- Generating leads or opportunities
These are broadly stated goals and you’ll likely want to drill down to specifics for your marketing campaign or program.
2. Align Your Teams
Once you have clearly defined goals, it’s time to get everyone on board. Identify who you need to execute your campaign or program and get their buy-in on what you want to accomplish.
If your ultimate goal is to close deals, your team should include sales as well as marketing. When you’re aligned end-to-end, you’ll have a more effective program that accelerates your buyer journey.
3. Know Your Ideal Customer
This is where you start to get into the nitty gritty – and where you need quality data and insights. Personalization inherently means you have to understand your buyers’ wants, needs, and interests. To get the best ROI on your dollars spent, you also need deep insights into how those wants, needs, and interests match up with what you’re trying to sell.
The great news is that technology just keeps getting better and faster. The latest trend for marketing and sales is RevTech, which helps these teams unify their 1st and 3rd party customer data to get that single, 360-degree view that marketers have yearned for.
With the right RevTech platform, you can get this view – and the accompanying insights that help you build your ideal customer profile so you know exactly which accounts to target with your messages.
Your ideal customer profile might include elements like:
- Company size
- Revenue
- Industry
- Location
- Current technology used
Or any other factor that helps you find the most likely buyers for your products solutions.
4. Build Targeted Audience Segments
The next step after you’ve created your ideal customer profile is to build your list of companies and people who fit that profile. RevTech helps you automate this process so that you can do it quickly and at scale.
Here are some ways you can segment your audiences for better targeting.
By buyer’s journey stage, which you can break down like this:
- Unaware of your solutions or not yet in-market
- In-market for a solution, based on 3rd party intent signals
- Engaged accounts - Anon. Visitors
- Engaged accounts - Known visitors
- Active opportunity
- Customers: For upsell/Xsell or retention
You can further segment by layers like industry or business size to deepen your targeting.
5. Choose Your Activation Channels
Part of understanding your ideal customer is knowing where and when your messages are likely to be most effective. Does your target persona read marketing emails on their smartphone at night? Then sending an email then might be the way to go. Are they Facebook junkies? Then maybe a social media ad is how to capture their attention.
It’s critical to know how your buyer approaches their journey, what channels they use, and then activate your campaigns in the right places at the right times. If an ad pops when no one is going to see it, then it isn’t worth your dollars.
Again, data is the key to knowing where to activate and when. And the right RevTech platform will ease and automate that activation so you can have always-on campaigns.
6. Craft Relevant Messaging
What you say is just as important – perhaps more so – than when and where you say it. Your content and message has to be relevant to your target account. It should speak with empathy to a problem, need, or desire they have – and how your solution offers value to them. The “what’s in it for me” value proposition should always be front and center.
Once more, data can help you decide the right things to say and really tighten your messaging to the segments you defined. In particular, intent data can help tell you what your buyers are interested in and searching for so that you can speak to their needs. You can match offers to their buyer journey stage or industry, for example.
7. Measure Outcomes
It isn’t enough to just switch on a marketing campaign. You have to know whether it worked, and that means quantifying those goals you identified and measuring results.
Some questions you can ask to determine how you measure success may include:
- Did your personalized account-based ads drive higher engagement and click-through-rates?
- Did personalized landing pages with messages crafted for your segments result in more form fills?
- Did aligning offerings to buying stage improve engagement and ROI?
- Did you see improvement in email opens or click-throughs for your marketing emails, and more meetings resulting from sales rep emails?
Driving Personalization at Scale
Personalization can yield great results for your marketing and sales efforts, but there can be hurdles to overcome to make it meaningful for your audience, and automated and scalable for your team. Organizational and data silos – or just plain bad or dirty data – can be huge stumbling blocks.
However, technology is rising to meet the needs of modern revenue teams. RevTech platforms, like D&B Rev.Up ABX, can help unify your 1st and 3rd party data, segment and build your ideal audiences, activate across channels, and measure outcomes. Automation makes the whole process scalable for companies of all sizes.
Our platform, which is backed by the wealth of data in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud as well as our industry-leading CDP, is built on the idea that what you need is not another fragmented tech experience, but one that seamlessly integrates with what you’re already using to make your work as frictionless as possible.
The information provided in articles are suggestions only and based on best practices. Dun & Bradstreet is not liable for the outcome or results of specific programs or tactics. Please contact an attorney or tax professional if you are in need of legal or tax advice.