How personal are you going to get?
To target and speak to people differently, you need to decide how you’re going to split them up. This is essential, as it determines the degree of personalization you'll need to build into your content. Here are your options:
The broadest way to split your audience is through segmentation. This is where you use top-level demographics like industry, job function, and geography to steer your content strategy. This is a good place to start while you gather more specific data about your audience.
You can get a little more defined by building customer personas. These include more specific information on the common pain points, priorities, and needs of segment subsets. For instance, in our case, we sell to marketers and salespeople - two different segments. With marketing, there are lots of different types of people with different priorities – from the CMO to content writers – who we want to build relationships with. We flesh those roles out into personas through user research and by looking at trends in data on what content different roles interact with.
When you're targeting a persona, you can (and probably already do) get even more specific by personalizing content based on which stage they're at in the buyer journey. Contextual data, like which types of pages on your website a person has read, can give you the insight you need to understand where they are and what their intent is. You can then send or surface the content that best serves that person's indicated needs to encourage them to progress to the next stage in their journey.
If you're in B2B sales or marketing then you're likely to be exploring account-based marketing (ABM). This approach requires you to create content and communications that are specific to each target account (business) and the interests, context, and needs that the organization has.
You can do one-to-one account-based personalization or one-to-few. The former means you specifically tailor your content and communications to a single target account. The latter - one to few - means you tailor your content and communications to speak to a few accounts at once. This is less time-intensive but can be equally effective if you have a number of accounts that face similar contexts and challenges.
Individual content personalization is the most granular way to tailor your output. You create and build custom content specific to one particular person’s unique context, interests, and pain points. Your output is as relevant to them as it can be and as such far more difficult for them to ignore.
You really need to know that person to pull this off. Or at least your CRM system does. It can be incredibly time intensive and costly to do personalization at this level beyond personalized emails and offers, which many of us will be accustomed to. But new technology can help.
The more interactions you have with a lead or prospect, the more you’ll learn about them, which will allow you to increasingly tailor your next interaction with them. This can be automated, but we'll get to that.
