By now, most B2B marketers have recognized the importance of personalizing the customer experience, which starts when a customer lands on a website and includes all of the interactions that occur after that.
And the key to this website personalization is good data: the more you know about a prospect’s behaviors, tastes and preferences, the more you can tailor the experience directly to their needs. This marks a complete 180-degree turn from earlier marketing efforts, which largely focused on “one-size-fits-all” customer experiences.
Think about the typical digital advertisement or the typical email newsletter – it’s the same for every visitor or recipient, regardless of industry, functionality or role. The future is all about using data to personalize those experiences, so that, for example, an email newsletter is perfectly tailored to an individual’s needs and preferences.
Yet, while B2B marketers may realize the importance of data in the quest to deliver the perfect customer experience, actually following through on it is a different matter. In fall 2016, Informatica and Ascend2 released a new study on B2B marketing and personalization solutions.
As part of the study, marketers were asked a series of questions to gauge their ability to use data as part of the personalization process. The first question for B2B marketers was: “What are the most significant barriers to achieving data-driven marketing success?”
The top response in this survey from Informatica and Ascend2 was perhaps not surprising – 61 percent of marketers said that “integrating data across platforms” was the major barrier. Another 49 percent suggested that “enriching data quality and completion” was another barrier. Finally, 48 percent suggested that “measuring data-driven marketing ROI” was another barrier.
So, putting all this together, it means that data is not being used by marketers as part of a seamless customer experience, and of the data that is being used, it’s still relatively hard to measure any type of ROI from it.
You can think of it this way – a B2B company needs to be able to take the data that it’s getting from its CRM software, its point-of-sale (POS) systems and its email marketing campaigns, and mix it all together into one seamless experience across a variety of different platforms. Theoretically, the data about how a prospect interacts with your company’s Facebook page can be combined with data from a retail POS experience, which can then be combined with data that already exists in a CRM system. Being able to do so would yield a very robust customer profile.
There was second interesting finding from the survey: data-driven marketing becomes more critical as the sales cycle becomes more complex. Just as prospects are fitting together more pieces of data to understand whether a certain offering is right for them, marketers are busy analyzing all the data that they already have, so that they can push the prospect to the next step of the customer journey.
This is exactly what B2B marketers already intuitively know – that selling very expensive, very sophisticated products is not the same as selling relatively simple to understand products. There’s a lot of time that’s required to educate the customer, nurture the customer, and convince the customer that your solution is the very best in the marketplace for their needs.
The good news, according to the survey, is that 95 percent of the B2B marketers surveyed said that their data-driven marketing efforts were increasingly successful, the more time they point into them. One reason for that might be the increasing number of new vendor software packages that make it possible to leverage data during the entire customer journey.
For example, consider how website personalization tools could enable companies to transform a generic customer experience into a “personalized delight.” The key is being able to target relevant messages to the right customer at the right time.
The way personalization software does this is by making it possible to integrate data from a wide variety of sources – CRM software, email service providers, data warehouses, analytics platforms, point-of-sale systems and data management platforms – and combine it all into a meaningful personalization experience.
And, the more personalized the experience is, the more value that B2B marketers are going to unlock. Customers are going to be spending more time on the site. Moreover, they are more likely to become loyal customers in the future. Finally, they are more likely to spread the word about you. In short, being able to personalize the entire customer experience with the use of data is going to drive your company’s future business success.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.