“There is now an established body of evidence that personalization has a massive impact on getting B2B buying groups to make it through the buying journey successfully.” The secret to effective personalization is pairing authenticity with relevancy at scale.
If you’re too generic or superficial, you’ll annoy people. If you encroach too much (especially into their personal lives), you’ll creep them out. It’s even possible to over-personalize within a segment of the buying group. The key is finding an appropriate balance.
The Core of Personalization
Our responses to personalization comes from a psychological need to know three things:
- That people care
- That what they have to share is relevant
- That they’re interested in helping us make the best use of our time.
“When it comes to dealing with potential buyers, it is your behavior that will demonstrate whether you genuinely care about them.”
Strategies such as putting the customer’s name in the subject line may work to get them to open an email, but it won’t cause them to engage with your content. The problem of frustration is compounded by the uniqueness inherent in each stakeholder, who you’re expecting to do the heavy lifting to close the deal.
There’s also a tendency to over rotate in hyper-personalization when your focus leans too heavily on individual stakeholder needs at the expense of a broader vision.
Mind their organizational objectives, then connect individual needs back to that broader vision. Work on tailoring your messages to the outlooks and interests of both the group and individual stakeholders, as well as to what you know of each role and each person’s emotional motivations.
Educate Stakeholders with Relevant Content
Content matters. “Since 74% of buyers get frustrated when content is not personalized to their interests, it’s a missing critical skill.”
Content should educate and give customers confidence. Effective content considers the audience and how they absorb information. “In short, adults crave relevance.” They need to quickly see how you’ll create value for them.
Once again, timing means everything. People are busy. We’ve all been in meetings and sat through demos that were a complete waste of time. Relevant content communicates more than just value-creating information—it shows you cared enough to do the hard work of finding the signals within the noise for them, so they don’t have to.
Creating Personalized Content
Like with everything in the DEEP-C™ Framework, personalized content starts with mapping buying group personas and then building relevant content. There are 6 steps:
- Identify your content library gaps in the areas of educational content, objection-resolution, social proof, and task facilitation.
- Involve those on your team most adept at personalization.
- Make a content development plan to complete the buyer enablement content strategy.
- Create and catalog your assets.
- Make it accessible to the sales team, train them on how to use it, and more importantly how to guide their champions to use it.
- Measure how the content is used and the impact it has.
Iterate fast and frequently to find the right balance.
How Consensus Helps
“When Consensus customers use advanced branching features in their interactive demos to discover the persona and target the message to them, their engagement rates almost always double overnight.”
