Only .75% of B2B leads generated become revenue through a traditional marketing strategy (Forrester). Why? One of the many possible explanations is due to a batch and blast email campaign approach where marketers don’t take the time to identify who their audience really is, leading to a quick unsubscribe. Your clients expect personalized marketing these days, and if you don’t know who your customers really are, you won’t be able to personalize the content to what they’re actually interested in, and keep them engaged in nurture programs. While you may still be sending generalized content, your competitors are doing their research and using personalized content. That personalized content is seeing 6x higher of a transaction rate than content that is not personalized to the prospect (Marketing Land).
To beat out your competitors and consistently nurture your prospects, you need to start personalizing your content based on who your prospects are and what they’re interested in.
Do you really know your customers?
Knowing your customers’ industry, # of employees, annual revenue, geography, and similar characteristics isn’t exactly knowing your customers, it’s knowing who their company is. To get to know your actual customers, buyer personas are the way to go. Buyer personas are representations of your ideal customer built through market research and real client data. What personas do is reveal what your prospects are doing and thinking as they make a decision on your product or service. Buyer personas are not descriptions of your clients, they go beyond that and include pieces such as actual decision-making criteria that your client went through when reviewing your solution. Utilize Buyer Personas to help build personalized emails that drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails (Market Research), and maintain consistent nurturing. Expand that into your website and more to see even more of an impact.
What are your customers actually interested in?
Using a marketing automation tool such as Pardot can give you insight into which product/service web pages of yours they’ve visited, for how long they stayed on the page, which whitepapers they downloaded, and much more. You can use this data to then create dynamic content based on who your prospect/client is and what they’re interested in. This way, when you send out email campaigns, you’re not sending the same product/service value props to a sales rep that you are to a CMO. Instead, you’re sending content about your product/service that would specifically benefit the CMO with their everyday tasks and sending different content to sales reps on how it would benefit them with their tasks.
Buyer Personas + Client Interests
Buyer Personas and personalized content based on the client’s interest fall under the umbrella of Account-Based Marketing (ABM); a strategy for B2B companies that is reported to have a higher ROI than other marketing activities, according to 97% of marketers in a survey (Alterra Group). Buyer personas are one of the pillars of ABM as your entire strategy is centered around these personas. ABM is a strategy combining Sales and Marketing principles to target key accounts and deliver hyper-personalized messaging to the decision makers through the channels they communicate on.
If you’d like to learn more about ABM or buyer personas, please submit our form below to receive our Account-Based Marketing Guide for B2B Marketers where we dive into what it is, how it’s different from traditional marketing, how to start, and more. You can also visit Corrao Group to learn more about ABM.
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