“Sometimes visitors come across a product or
a solution by a brand they don’t know, so even if they like the solution, they wouldn’t sign up for any download or next step on the same page because they know nothing about the brand,” said Boaz Grinvald, CEO and Founder of BrightInfo, thailand telemarketing database a content recommendation engine. “Most often, users would read about the brand and its customer, and then decide they want to engage with that vendor.
With personalization techniques, [marketers] can actually
understand the users’ interest in the company, and even on generic landing pages, offer them the right type of next steps to make sure they convert once they’re ready for it. You don’t force them to go back and look at the product pages and irrelevant offers.”
In an example of these buyer expectations
the 2014 B2B Web Usability Report revealed that an overwhelming number of buyers (90%) browse vendor web sites expecting to find information about “products and services” available directly on the homepage. An even higher rate (93%) are either annoyed or actually leave the site if interrupted by a video or audio that plays automatically.
Marketers revere web site personalization for more
than the capabilities it provides, whether it’s driving customer engagement or conversion rates; personalization efforts can be easily integrated into existing solutions.“You can collect these preferences and score those values in your digital marketing platform, and easily put them to use,” Valentine said. “You can marry up a content management system with your web site and really start to tailor the experience of what content you’re putting on the web site, as well as where you’re putting it based on the values you have for an individual in your digital marketing database.”
According to Tory Upchurch,
VP of Sales and Customer Operations at Get Smart Content, web site personalization serves as a “conversion solution” that is ultimately necessary to maximize the effectiveness of all other marketing functions.
“Marketers spend so much time segmenting
their audience and ensuring that they have targeted content from an email perspective,” Upchurch said. “They worry about SEO and placing ads, and it’s all about driving traffic to the web site to convert to a lead. The challenge is that they don’t solve the crux of the problem, which is conversion. They throw more money at driving more traffic to the web site and at some point you just can’t cram all that traffic when you have the same fundamental conversion problem.”
Personalization Via Reverse IP Lookup And Revolving Content
Adobe has implemented the Demandbase platform into both Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics to assist in their personalization efforts. Adobe has been able to leverage Demandbase to perform reverse IP lookup, enabling the company to identify potential buyers via company data and demographic information, and deliver content based on this information.
“Using the Demandbase platform,
for us [the value] has been about the anonymous visitor intelligence, where we can start to understand 15% to 20% more of our visitors better than we would have been able to do without the IP lookup,” said Jeff Fuhriman, Senior Manager of Conversion Optimization at Adobe. “By using that, we’re able to gather some of the most pertinent information such as revenue range.”
Software provider Blackbaud has improved its web site personalization capabilities page with help from Get Smart Content. The content personalization solution was able to edit the four banners on the web site’s home page so they could be tailored to different buyer segments.
“We essentially try to show content on
a few different spots on our site to the visitor based on some of the things we know about them, whether it’s what they search for on Google or Bing, what type of product or content pages they visited on our web site and where they spent the most time,” said Frank Barry, Director of Digital Marketing at Blackbaud. “We also do a little bit of targeting around whether or not they’re a customer based on our marketing automation and sales platform.”
Despite Benefits, Data Comprehension Is Required
With web site personalization solutions becoming more accurate through the buying process, the future is looking bright for B2B marketers.
However, regardless of the sophistication of the solutions involved, there needs to be a deeper understanding of data for web site personalization to truly be effective.
“Personalization efforts are only as good as your data source, and your profile that you’re building through your customers,” said Carl Hancock, Website Optimization Manager at Adobe. “If you don’t have very good data and you can’t anticipate what your user needs or who they are, then there’s really not a whole lot to personalize.”
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Glenn Taylor is an Associate Editor for G3 Communications, a digital media firm specializing in B2B marketing. Their publications include: Demand Gen Report; Retail TouchPoints; and Channel Marketer Report.... View full profile