We marketers love our buzzwords and the latest one seems to be personalisation, but what does it mean and how can we use it in B2B marketing?
In the IDMs 2014 B2B Barometer Report, personalisation is highlighted as one of three major trends in B2B marketing. The report goes onto encourage marketers to personalise their content in order to better engage their audience quoting statistics such as an increase of 270% in content consumption for personalised content.
But it's not just the case of adding a couple of merge variables in your email tool. Personalisation is all about segmenting your data properly and using that information to target specific content and suspects who will be more receptive to your material and ultimately be more likely to buy from you. In practice this could take a lot of work or a professional partner to set up and requires a well maintained and in some instances in depth database. The rewards can be large as the IDM report also suggests that you could see a 30% increase in conversation rates when targeted in this way.
However these conversations don't just start themselves! In order to make the most of our hard work we need to monitor our interactions and make a judgement on when and how to engage the now warm prospect. Depending on our strategy this could mean handing over the warm leads directly to sales or to avoid the time wasters we can use telemarketing to further qualify the leads moving seamlessly from MQL to SQL. Either way communication between the teams is the key and we need to remember that just as our content was personalised so should our approach to the prospect be. Always treat them as individual and never use a script.
Finally it is important to remember that just because someone has consumed our content they may not be ready to buy...yet. Nurturing these uncommitted leads with more personalised content is a key tool in maintaining a consistent sales pipeline.
