Where data and creativity collide
There are lots of different ways you can use personalization along the digital buyer journey, and lots of different assets you can personalize. Before you worry about formats, though, you need to focus on data and workflows.
There are three types of personalization, broadly speaking:
This one requires the user to make active choices that in turn impact the experience they have. They're in control, and very aware of the personalization at play. They need to be motivated enough, though, to use it. Product filters are perhaps the most common examples of this.
The second type is overt, but passive for the user. They can clearly see that they are being presented with a personalized experience, but they're not actively controlling it. It may directly reference them, feature information about past interactions they've had, or feature something clearly custom to them.
With the third type, the user could be entirely oblivious to the fact that they're receiving a personalized experience, but they do or should feel that they're getting a very relevant and convenient one, which keeps them tuned in.
What all three have in common is a user-centricity that relies on you getting to know your audience.
In order to get started with the 'what' and 'when' of personalization, you need to be capturing some kind of meaningful information about your customer.
With active personalization, you're explicitly asking them for that information at the point of interaction, which requires a certain degree of buy-in on their part. For passive and unstated, you're using the information you've already captured or discovered to provide a convenient and valuable experience.
As a buyer moves down the funnel, use the most contextually informative data you can get hold of. Like which products they've spent the most time browsing, or which topics they engage with the most. Pair that with demographics, like industry, or location, and you'll start to have the insights needed to create meaningfully personalized digital interactions.
your company will likely be capturing a lot of data about the people who interact with your brand at different touchpoints. This data is a goldmine for your personalization efforts.
Capturing all this data is step one, then you need to decide what to do with it. What are the behavioral events you're able to capture that will steer how and when a particular content piece or offer is sent out or surfaced to the user? You'll need to define rules and criteria at each stage, and create the appropriate workflows within your automation platforms and content management systems.
When starting out, it's totally ok to use common sense to shape hypothesis for this, which you can then return to and refine based on performance data down the line. You'll probably need to do this for top-of-funnel personalization, where you don't yet know much about the person who is interacting with your brand.
Lower down the funnel, you have more data and can be far more precise. This is where most personalization of the non-automated (and therefore resource-heavy) variety has taken place. In B2B, Sales reps tend to reach out to potential buyers directly and manually pull together customized pitches and proposals. In fact, until pretty recently, Sales were the store clerks of the B2B world – they built your company's customer relationships. These days your website is your storefront, clerk, shopping aisles, and product catalog all in one. And you have the power to present it all in different ways depending on who walks through the "door".
Results: reader aggregates
In the last chapter, we talked about splitting your audience based on where they are in the buyer journey. You can create a personalized experience for people at different stages of their journey, even at points where you don't have much information about them yet.
As soon as someone interacts with a digital product you own - including your website - they reveal information that you can use to enhance their experience. That's assuming you have some kind of tracking set up, like Google Analytics (GA). If you do, then you're already collecting information about a user when they land on your content:
And so on.
You'll also know which page they're reading and can (with the right tool) work out in real-time from the contents of that page roughly what their intentions are for visiting.
Intelligent chatbots can help users find answers to their questions, entertain them, and collect useful information for you to use for further personalization when the user returns.
What can you do with this information? Conversational marketing. With clever chatbots like those provided by our friends over at Drift, you can use the above to personalize what the bot says to a user, where it suggests they look next and to nudge them into a conversation that further personalizes their experience.
You might already be using certain tools that serve up a different version of your website depending on your visitor's IP address. This is pretty common in e-commerce, for instance. But there are now tools that let you take personalized website experiences a step further. You can pull your content together into a custom landing page for a given persona, account, or individual automatically. This is great for doing account-based paid advertising campaigns at scale, for instance.
Speaking of scale, how about going one step further than landing pages, and creating personalized thought leadership at scale? Or customized product collateral at scale? Content automation tools like Turtl make it possible to configure long-form content for personalization. This makes it possible to autogenerate custom product explainers that are uniquely curated and personalized for each of your target accounts. Or create custom thought leadership reports where each and every chapter included is highly relevant to the reader.
Video isn't just a great format for your top and mid-funnel activities. Personalized videos have taken off in a big way in the SDR and Sales circles. It's never been easier to create and use personalized videos at scale thanks to providers like Vidyard, and it can take your email or proposal from a bland dime-a-dozen experience to a warm, attention-grabbing relationship starter.
