Adapting Consumer Personalization Techniques to Business Marketing

The personalized online experience has long been the north star for consumer marketing. When I land on Amazon.com, I’ll see a list of products related to my interests. Netflix.com, movies I might like. The best companies are using the information they have to create a relationship with their brand that goes beyond their vanilla offering.

But it’s not always easy… perhaps Netflix thinks I changed my name…

Beyond the basics of sending an email with a name, personalization is inherently more difficult in business marketing. Netflix and Amazon have huge databases full of data about each person they interact with… a B2B lead database generally has much less information. So how can we create the same level of engagement?

Our Approach

It’s something we’ve spent a lot of time working on here at Babcock & Jenkins. Nearly every marketing campaign we design for clients is B2B. Every client we work with has different needs, so we’ve come up with a way to systematically apply personalization techniques to our client’s campaigns.

Is it easy? Hell no. The complexity goes up enormously. But it’s something we’ve gotten good at, and the payoff is almost always worth the trouble… or so our clients’ sales teams tell us.

A typical B2B personalization plan includes:

1. Contact Name
2. Prospect Company Name
3. Title Level
   1. Technical, or Business?
   2. Executive (strategy), or Mid Level (implementation)
4. Sales Rep / Account Manager
   1. Photo and Signature (nice personal touch)
   2. Name and Phone number with Click to Talk
5. Industry
   1. Case studies, personalized message
6. Content Consumption
   1. Past interest, when available

A significant amount of work goes into collecting this data, and getting it into a structured format that is actionable. To complicate matters further – it’s always changing! So along with collecting the information once, we have to establish a process for updating it over time. That said, once it’s done, we have an amazing platform for high performance marketing.

We’ll use this data to personalize EVERYTHING – websites, emails, direct mail, media programs, you name it. At the end of the process, each prospect receives communications that relate back to his or her business, and begins the process of building a relationship, even before the first phone call is made.